We live in a deep delusion, an illusion of hope, of an impending tomorrow, of a future. As humans, we cannot survive without self-deceptions. Nietzsche once said that man cannot live with the truth; he needs dreams and illusions; he needs many kinds of lies to live. And what Nietzsche said is true. As humans are, they cannot live with the truth. This is something that needs to be deeply understood because without understanding it, one cannot embark on the exploration called yoga.
And for this, the mind must be deeply understood – the mind that needs lies, that needs illusions; the mind that cannot live with the truth; the mind that desperately needs dreams.
Now scientists say that man can live without sleep, but not without dreams. In ancient times, it was understood that sleep was a great necessity of life. But now modern research says that sleep is not really a great necessity. Sleep is needed so that you can dream. Dreams are essential. If you are not allowed to dream in your sleep, you will not find yourself refreshed and alive in the morning. You will feel as tired as if you had not slept at all.
The night is a time for both deep sleep and dreams. There is a cycle, a rhythm. Just as there is a rhythm of day and night coming and going. In the beginning, you fall into a deep sleep, for about forty or forty-five minutes. Then the dream state begins and you start dreaming. Then dreamless sleep comes, and then the dreams start coming again. This sequence goes on all night. If your sleep is interrupted at the time when you are sleeping in deep, dreamless sleep, you will not feel in the morning that something has been lost. But if sleep breaks when you are dreaming, then in the morning you will feel completely tired and weak.
Now these things can also be known from the outside. If someone is asleep, you can tell whether they are dreaming or not. If they are dreaming, their eyes will be constantly moving; they will be fixed. When the eyes are moving and you are disturbed, you will feel tired and sluggish in the morning. And if the eyes are still and sleep is broken, then there is no fatigue when you wake up in the morning, nothing is lost.
Many researchers have proven that the human mind thrives on dreams. Although dreams are a completely self-deception. Then this dream talk is not only true about the night; when you are awake, there is a similar process going on in the mind. Even during the day, you can experience that at some times dreams are floating in the mind and at other times there are no dreams.
You do not dream only at night; you keep dreaming even when you are awake. You are looking at me, listening, but a stream of dreams is constantly running in you. The mind is constantly creating dreams, images and fantasies.
When dreams are going on during the day and if you are doing something, then you will be absent because somewhere inside you are busy. The mind oscillates day and night between these states – from non-dream to dream and then from dream to non-dream. This is an internal rhythm. So it is not that we only dream continuously at night, but in life also we keep projecting our hopes towards the future.
The present is almost always like hell. You live with it only with the help of those hopes that you have projected into the future. You live today, trusting in tomorrow. You keep hoping that something will happen tomorrow; that the doors of some paradise will open tomorrow. They certainly do not open today. And when tomorrow comes, it does not come like tomorrow; it comes like 'today'. But by then your mind has moved on again. You keep running ahead of yourself; that is the meaning of dreams. You are not one with reality, that which is near, that which is present here and now. You are somewhere else, moving forward – jumping and leaping forward!
You have given many names to that tomorrow, that future. Some call it heaven, some call it liberation. But it is always in the future. Someone is thinking about money, but that money is also going to be found in the future. Someone is lost in the aspiration of heaven, but that heaven is to come after death. Heaven is far away, in some distant future. For what is not, you lose your present – this is the meaning of living in a dream. You cannot be here and now. It seems impossible to be in this moment.
You can live in the past because it is also dreamlike: the memories, memories of things that are no more. Or you can live in the future, but that too is a projection, it is something to be created from the past. The future is nothing else but a reflection of the past – more colourful, more beautiful, and more pleasant, but it is still a refined form of the past.
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