The mind games upon waking from a dream

  • 2019
Table of contents hide 1 The desire for domination of Arjuna 2 Laziness upon awakening 3 Sleep disorders 4 Overcoming parasomnias

The study of dream interpretation has always been, at all times, a matter of interest to philosophers, scholars and people in general. In other articles we have seen great thinkers who have tried to unravel both the meaning of dreams, as the reason and the ways in which we dream.

More recently, in times of modern science, psychology has been able to establish the behavior of the brain and of the mind during the hours of sleep, in terms of activity, with considerable approximation. Thus, the phases of the dream were announced, named as REM and as N-REM. There are very interesting documents that describe these processes.

There, in these investigations, it was possible to see how brain activity is reactivated in the last phase, REM. It is in that phase, near the awakening of a dream, where the dreams we remember occur, because it is at that moment that the brain has time to let itself be impressed by what the mind is elaborating on the abstraction of the dream.


In that REM phase (acronym that means “rapid eye movement”, that is, rapid eye movement, also called MOR), it is as if the brain were an engine that starts, and the “gasoline” of dreams that was circulating through the mind, manages to sneak up to it and make it fix images, which when we wake up we remember.

That is, mind and brain are not the same thing. There are discussions in science about the location of the mind in the brain, but the ancient teachings of esotericism have always said that they are different things. It is the mind that hosts ideas and thoughts, and the brain is the physical vehicle to connect our physical body to those mental ideas. Thanks to the brain, our physical body can receive orders from the mind.
Then, that motor said before by way of comparison, which would be the brain, that bridge of communication between our mind and our consciousness, which allows memories, is an engine of high performance .

What do you mean by this? Old teachings tell us that the mind is a part of our personality so vast, so developed, that it has a very rich and complex life of its own.
Our mind is like a Being within us, a Being within another Being, that we are. So much so that sometimes we identify with her, and giving or not realizing we say: I am my mind . But later, at other times, we realize that it is not so, that we are not our mind, but the activity of the mind is so great and so much what our conscience captures, that at times it seems to us that it was We ramos her.

Arjuna's desire for domination

The brain, as the receiving and transmitting organ of the elaborations of the mind, also has a vast development that responds to its complexity and development.
He tells us in the sacred Bhagavad Gita of India, in chapter 6: 34, 35, that Arjuna laments his master Krishna, saying:

Because of my concern I have not been able to have lasting results in my attempts to calm my mind as you have taught me. Really, the mind is restless, tumultuous, intensely stubborn! Oh Krishna, I consider it as difficult to train as the wind.
And Krishna answers: Oh Arjuna with powerful arms, the mind is undoubtedly capricious and rebellious, but it can be controlled thanks to the practice of yoga, and the exercise of mental equanimity.


That is, Krishna, in saying that the mind is capricious and rebellious, is referring to that Being that is the mind. It means that despite being part of our personality, it has its own desires.
This should not surprise us. Doesn't the same thing happen with other parts of our personality, such as our physical body? We all know that our physical body often behaves as a being apart from us, even if it is at our service and is part of us as well. By himself he sleeps, and by himself he breathes, without our intervention or help. He also has desires beyond what we would like him to have: he often wants to eat or sleep when we want him to attend to other matters.
Thus, it also happens with the mind, it has its own desires .

Due to the presence of the species of monkeys in the Asian country of Krishna and Arjuna, India, many times the mind is also compared with that animal. The mind would be like a monkey that jumps from branch to branch, never wanting to stand still.
Thus, they say, are our thoughts. At one time we remember one thing, and the next comes the desire for another. Next, a concern replaces both, and then a memory also replaces the latter, and so on ... we always have our "monkey mind" jumping between the branches of our desires and feelings.

Upon waking from a dream, we said, the brain starts up as if it were an engine, and if the "monkey mind" gave it gasoline, it receives the tumult of memories that minutes before the mind was making in the dream.
Sometimes, those memories do not seem many to us because, as we said, the brain is just waking up, getting going, and the time it has to capture "memories of the mind" is restricted. It oscillates between a few minutes, and sometimes only seconds. Sometimes, he will be able to catch many memories and we will have complete dreams that we will be able to observe, and other times, very few images or none, due to the different way he had to wake up.
But in any of those cases, the mind will always have the behavior of "restless monkey" : while contributing dreams to remember, these are a cataract of disjointed or seemingly unconnected images, and after waking up, you will receive the flood of images and sensations that give us our senses that become active again, and places us again to attend to their varied and permanent thoughts.

As we have seen in the aforementioned passage, Arjuna, Krishna's disciple, aspires to dominate the mind.
Why do you want this? Why don't you like your mind to behave like a monkey?
Let's consider that carefully.

Let us first take, as an example, the case of any two people. In two people chosen at random, but where one of them is calm and has serene thoughts, and the other is restless and has erratic thoughts, we observe that the first is usually someone who has a more fruitful and happy life than the second.

In modern psychology, many times the disorder in which the person has difficulty mastering their thoughts is diagnosed with the name of neurosis .
He says in the journal "Psychology and Mind" about neurotic people: "Another characteristic of neurotic people is that there is relatively little consistency in their actions and in their discourse. The reason for this is that the emotional state of the moment influences a lot, and that makes the reasoning that could structure the thought disappear or lose importance during the time in which the emotional wins the game. ”
Neurosis is a very common pathology, it does not mean a serious disease or a disorder without recovery, but it is a psychological problem that, due to its characteristics, serves to exemplify this millenary need to overcome the difficulty in controlling thoughts. As the text says, in people with neuroses, which are many, emotions interfere with thoughts more than advisable, and in the same thoughts there is not much ordering, as they tend to contradict each other.

And what about the next test we will do next ?
Choose a quiet place where the lights can go out, and sit with your back straight and comfortably, facing a fixed point. Then, narrow your eyes and try to imagine a simple object, something that is easy to represent. For example, a green filled rectangle. Or a fruit like being a pear or an orange.
Once the object has been chosen, try to keep it with the chosen characteristics for five minutes. You will see that the object is blurred, and that to keep it in its original form you will have to make an effort. If you chose for example orange, you will see that it changes its color, or that it becomes larger, or that it stops being an orange and becomes something else. After five minutes, it will have been necessary to correct the image several times so that it becomes the original orange again.
That is what Arjuna calls "restless, tumultuous mind." And also "stubborn", because as much as we tell him to leave the orange still, he will deform it again or even make it disappear.


It is that the mind, as we have said at the beginning, is a Being in itself, in addition to being a Being of our personality. It has its own desires, as our physical body also has, and one of its desires is to do what it occurs to it. He does not like to follow orders from our soul, he does not like to receive instructions from the Being that contains it, and that it is us.
There is nothing silly in Arjuna's desire for domination over his own mind. If we do not master our mind, if we do not have it at least by doing the things we want on a daily basis and not those that she wants, then she will be wandering. Then, you will have conflicting thoughts and let yourself be filtered by emotions, as in the case of neuroses, because you will not mind if your conclusions are logical.
Logic is one of the tools that we have available to human beings, to learn to dominate our mind. This is how wise people have explained it to us as S crates, Plat n and Arist teles.

Let's try to imagine what would happen, if we could always keep the orange still in the exercise seen. If during the five minutes the orange did not suffer the least alteration, that would mean that our mind is aimed at always doing our will. That she is being truly educated, and that she will not deviate with fantasies when we have to meditate on situations and problems to be solved.
We can repeat that exercise every day, if we want to facilitate the arrival to that result one day. But above all, becoming aware of the presence and influence of our mind throughout the day is the task that we mainly need to give ourselves . She always conditions us, whether we like it or not, and that is why it is in our best interest that this conditioning be favorable to us, and not an imposition of the occurrences of the mind on our spirit.

Upon waking from a dream, the mind will project images, and the brain will receive them, as we have seen. As we were sleeping and we could not ask our mind to think what we want, it was behaving very erratically, giving free rein to its fantasies. A part of those fantasies is what we remember later as `` dreamed ''.
If we already have a little accustomed to our mind to receive our orders, if we already have something exercised as exercised by Arjuna, then that awakening will tend to be ordered. If our mind used to be erratic and disobedient, then we will be assaulted by unmanageable fantasies upon waking, which can bring us a bad mood or sadness when we wake up. If on the contrary we already have a more educated mind, the ideas that it brings will be much more bearable.

Laziness upon waking

Something that is not precisely a dysfunction or a disorder but that occurs quite frequently, is a certain laziness that surprises us upon waking. When we reach the end of the REM phase (also called MOR), and the brain begins to activate to give way to waking consciousness, that is, when waking up, sometimes that transit is not fast Neither ordered but invaded by complicated ideas .
We commonly know this as pereza to wake up, which is similar to another laziness, that of to get up, but occurs before this second.
It is usually accompanied by a feeling of displeasure. Basically, what you feel is, first, that you are waking up but you don't want to do it because you felt good sleeping and dreaming, and second, that this “conflict of interest” between wanting to keep sleeping on the one hand, and the desire to want Waking up to meet the daily obligations of another, results in a "small stress" that is the one that causes discomfort at the time of waking up.

If the person who feels all this does not take precaution to make a certain effort to free himself from this phenomenon, it will surely be repeated on successive days and it may even become a habit to be suffering from this situation every day.
So it happens that some people "grab fame" of lazy people: "Have you seen how Juan gets angry whenever I try to wake him up?" - Maria always takes time to sit on her bed - Pedro seems to fight with her arms every time she wakes up and always takes time to do so ”. This kind of comments and similar ones are generated.
There really is no one who feels happy waking up that way, it is a real problem that, although not serious, is still undesirable.
As we have just said, the origin of this problem may be that we do not live a daily life enough to our liking, we live it first and foremost as an obligation, and that makes dreaming more pleasant than being awake. If this is what happens and the phenomenon is caused by that fact, then we must give ourselves a space in greater time to reflect on our daily lives.

First, when making this reflection, which can be done during a meditation, it should be noted that this desire to continue sleeping can be linked to memories of past experiences . For example, there are people who were happy in their childhood, but when they assumed responsibilities when they reached adulthood, they found that their life was not so satisfactory. So, they tend to dream of situations experienced years before, and do not want to wake up to assume the present.
Even in this apparently seemingly hard case, the person has to do the following reasoning: no matter how many undesirable things there may be in his waking life, it will not bring him the delay to wake up . Not only will he not be able to reduce his problems "sleeping 5 or 10 extra minutes", but also, he will not even be able to sleep those minutes in peace. It will not mean having 10 more minutes of well-being, as he supposedly had them while dreaming, but it will be 10 tortuous minutes because what will prevail will be only the stress of being in conflict between wanting to sleep and the duty to wake up.

On the other hand, the damage caused by those 10 minutes of instability is significant. If they become a habit, they will daily introduce an energy distortion that instead of improving the person's quality of life, will deteriorate it to some extent. Your daily problems that displease you will get a little worse instead of better.
They produce the opposite effect of listening to good music or having a good reading for 10 minutes before going to sleep. The latter, if we do it daily, will improve the quality of dreaming and therefore our whole life. It will also help us in our personal relationships and our work.
On the other hand, the first thing, to maintain the difficulty to wake up, introduces a depressing “story” to our mind, which are chaotic fantasies that do not become dreams but neither waking awareness.


The solution to this problem is quite easy to find. To solve it, as already said, one must begin by becoming aware that it is a problem, and not a fun or desirable habit. Once this awareness is taken, it is necessary to fix in the mind before going to sleep, the idea that when there is a desire to continue sleeping when you wake up, you have to get up abruptly without giving time to mental arguments or excuses of any kind.
Some people in doing this action, have tipped the solution a bit and have done things like get up and put your feet in a bucket with cold water. We do not deny that this is a solution, but we also recommend being a little careful with overly drastic practices, which in addition to being unnecessary can lead to other types of alterations of our psyche.

What you have to do is, you barely take notice that the time has come to wake up, to give the order that cannot be postponed to our body (we would say, military type), something like I LIFT UP, NOW !!, execute that action instantly and then Observe the results. What will happen is that the waking consciousness is not yet fully active and we feel a little dizzy.
At this time, instead of putting our feet in a bucket of cold water, we must stand up while sitting, and try to remember what we had to do for today. If the first thing to do is something unpleasant like hurrying to work, you have to try to wake up a few minutes before to have time to do something nice, like having a tea that we like or listening to good music, or watching a beautiful landscape, even in a video. The mind should not be conditioned by the memory that the first thing we do when we get up is something unpleasant.
If it is very difficult for us to stand with our backs up and tempts us to go back to bed, we must get up at all (trying to avoid walking on our backs), holding ourselves on a wall if necessary, and wait one or two minutes until the memories of waking Activate at all. Putting the will to attract these memories faster can help. Turning on a light can also help us.

Once we wake up at all, while having tea or doing another nice action like the ones already proposed, we will remember the days when we let ourselves be overcome by “the vice of not waking up”, and we will compare our mood of those moments, with the that we have in the present moment. We will see that it is much more pleasant to be awake drinking that tea, than having been struggling inside us in a state of stress while lying down.
Making this effort several days in a row, the mind will remember that it is much more pleasant to wake up quickly, and the problem will have been overcome since it will not occur again.

Sleep disorders

The case we have mentioned at the beginning, of neurosis, besides being a very frequent diagnosis in psychology, is not the only problem that sometimes arises related to the management of thoughts.

Actually, the amount of negative phenomena in relation to emotions and the mind that may arise due to the difficulty in handling thoughts, is very large. Disorders such as sleep paralysis and sleepwalking, also have to do with that ignorance of dominion over our mind.


Let us now know a little about the first of those two cases, that of sleep paralysis. This, according to what current medicine has been studying, is a temporary inability to perform any type of voluntary movement that takes place during the transition period between the dream state and the of wakefulness It can occur at the time of beginning to sleep or when waking up and is usually accompanied by a feeling of great anguish . Its duration is usually short, usually between one and three minutes, after which the paralysis yields spontaneously.
During the episode, the person is fully aware, with hearing and tactile ability, but is unable to move or speak, which can cause great anxiety . However, there is no danger to life, as the respiratory muscles continue to function automatically. This disorder is included in the international classification of sleep disorders within the group of parasomnias . "

Parasomnias are brief disorders that occur related to sleep and waking, which do not usually have serious consequences.
As the aforementioned text says, sleep paralysis does not carry any danger to life. But it is a very unpleasant moment, reminiscent of a nightmare.
Both in nightmares and in sleep paralysis, the disorder of the ideas that circulate in those moments through the mind is notorious. They assault all kinds of worries related to chaotic images that have no real or rational foundation.
They are therefore the product of what is known in esotericism as projections of the astral body (emotional body, or psyche of affections). These projections, mental ideas that emerged from the astral, are the result of insecurities that occur in people's daily lives, which in turn are an expression of difficulties for the development of a healthy spiritual life.
Something nothing strange, since we are in a world in which the spiritual life entails many difficulties because materialism is encouraged.

Here is a point where esotericism has a lot to collaborate with, because it can provide information and reflection on these parasomnia-like disorders, about which psychology has not yet developed all the satisfactory cures.

To begin with, esotericism is quite in agreement with psychology that healthy practices, such as those recommended in the previous point about laziness upon waking, also help fight parasomnias: ten minutes of reading and sound sounds before bedtime, another ten minutes of a good habit to get up, and so on.

To continue, mysticism teaches us that the human being is composed of four mortal bodies, and three spiritual bodies, adding seven in total, and the united and harmonious conformation of all of them defines the individual .

The four mortal bodies are: physical body (stula sharira), energetic body (pranic), astral or emotional body (linga sharira) and reasoning mental body (kama-manas). The three spiritual bodies are: creative mind (Manas), divine intuition (Budhi) and pure will (Atma).
In order to better understand the functioning of these bodies it is recommended to read the bibliography indicated in this regard, but we will not go into these details now so as not to deviate too much from the subject of this article.
The important thing, once the concepts of what each of the seven bodies that are explained in these sections are correctly understood, is to discover the intense relationship that exists between the astral and kama bodies, that is, between the 3rd and 4th body, if the physical body is listed first.


To get an idea of ​​how strong and important this union between these two bodies is, we can compare it to the union that exists between the physical body and the pranic body . The physical body is the one we know best, because we can see and touch it, and the pranic body is a bubble of energy that contains it (it seems to the seers that it "emanates" from the physical body, but in truth the physical body is a dependency of pranic and not vice versa). When a physical body lacks a pranic body, as with a corpse, it shows immediately because when we see it we realize that it has no life. What we call life is the perception that it contains the energy of the pranic body.
When we look at a person who is sleeping, we find something other than if we look at a corpse. Clairvoyants perceive it even more clearly, but anyone with a little sensitivity realizes at a glance that the sleeping body has something that the dead body does not contain.

As soon as the pranic body separates from the physical one when the person dies, the latter does not take long to break down into parts until it disappears (and in reality the same happens to the pranic one on his part). Although they were two different bodies, both behaved while they were together as if they were a unit.
The same happens with the astral body, body of all our emotions, and the mental body kama, body of all our rational thoughts. They are two distinctly distinct bodies, but they are completely imbricated within each other. And also when the person dies, both break down at the same time, but generally they do not break down as quickly as the physical-pranic, they take a little longer (they can take much longer).

Then, returning to our issue of parasomnias, it happens that this excessive ease to trigger emotions that activate chaotic thoughts about waking up time, has to do with an astral, daytime and nighttime activity, unnecessarily complicated by various motivations.

If we can act on the cause of these motivations, our astral will be harmonized . Perhaps not everything necessary to lead from the beginning a full spiritual life, but as if at least, in a short time, overcome any kind of parasomnia such as those mentioned sleep paralysis and sleepwalking.

In the case of sleepwalking, there have been even extreme cases. This parasomnia is that the person being awake, walks and acts as if, to some extent, were awake. It is known from the investigation that the person during his sleepwalking is asleep, in the NREM phase. Extreme cases have had to do with nightmares acted: the person begins to speak or shout while walking or sitting, describing scenes of distress through words. If he is spoken to, it is usually in vain to want to convince him to calm down, because the person is not guided by his reasoning (for this his conscience should be awake, that he can only be awake). Instead of being guided by its reasoning, it is guided by its astral sensations, which are the animal experiences of the astral body. To put it in some way, it literally behaves like an animal.

Trying to calm her down usually leads to greater sleepwalking despair, because the sleepwalker hears that they speak to her and instead of interpreting the words, she violently incorporates them into the scene of her dream. It is as if an angry dog ​​is approaching us, and we try to calm him down by giving him explanations so that he does not get angry. Surely with that we will only make the dog bark even more.


This happens because our astral body is precisely the body we have in common with animals . Minerals only have physical body, vegetables have physical body and practical body. Animals have these two bodies and also astral body. Humans, we have the three animal bodies, and also the kama mental body, which alchemically speaking determines us as beings of the fire element (animals are beings of the air element). But if for some reason kama did not work for us, as indeed happens during sleepwalking, then in our behavior we will be completely like an animal.

In this, in the operation of kama, there is the key to overcoming various conditions, including sleepwalking and sleep paralysis.

In the paralysis of the kama dream it is not so deactivated, there may be visions that resemble more reasoning, but also in this case it is not a kama- healthy manas who suffers from this problem.

Overcoming parasomnias

In people who have achieved a certain degree of harmony in their daily lives, and have developed healthy customs such as those already described in the ten beautiful minutes before bedtime and upon rising, the probability of occurrence of these parasomnias and others, is practically void Together with the elaboration of positive daily thoughts that accompany the harmonization work of meditation, there is a progressive disappearance of any parasomnia.

We can come to understand the reason for this if we think for a moment about the relationship between the kama-manas body and the astral body.
During sleepwalking, the astral body is active, but kama-manas is completely inactive. To some extent, it is normal for the astral to be active during the NREM deep sleep phase, because the astral by nature never sleeps. We do not remember the vast majority of what we dream, but the astral never disconnects completely from the activity, it is always generating images that then almost none will be remembered because the brain's memory is not activated until the arrival of the REM phase.
Memory and consciousness are not activated, but the force of astral energy is such that it puts the physical mechanisms of the physical body to work, and this is what allows the person to walk while sleeping. Then, if at that time the person speaks, he will express only sensations that occur in the astral body, while his kama-manas is still inactive.

In a healthy person of all parasomnia, the great astral energy is not blocked to the point of being forced to go "down", to activate the physical mechanisms of stula-sharira (physical body), but, remaining through the kama bridge -manas en contacto con Manas, el quinto cuerpo (o quinto elemento Mente Divina), nuestro ser espiritual, su energía queda a la espera de recibir las vibraciones de ese cuerpo superior.
Volviendo a la comparación con el animal, es como si se tratara del cuerpo astral de un perro domesticado y obediente. Ya no nos ladra, sino que, mansamente, queda muy vivo y coleando. Contento incluso, esperando recibir instrucciones de su amo, Manas, para cumplirlas alegremente.


Y es que, nunca se habla lo suficiente acerca de la necesidad que todos tenemos de armonizar nuestros cuatro cuerpos mortales, para que resuenen (vibren) en concordancia con la esencia de los otros tres cuerpos, los espirituales, que para nuestro grado evolutivo se resumen en el cuerpo Manas.
Cuando tal puente funciona bien, cuando kama-manas conecta nuestra tríada espiritual con el triángulo inferior físico-prana-astral, aunque sea tan sólo unos minutos al día, entonces el cuerpo astral ya no vuelve a irritarse ni a resentirse, y no volverá a tener pesadillas ni parasomnias, porque entenderá cual es su lugar y se sentirá satisfecho. A esa función de puente que hace kama-manas se la conoce como antakarana .

No hace falta que “creamos” en ninguno de estos términos sánscritos para que todo esto pueda llegar a nuestra realidad propia de cada uno. Nuestro objetivo no es llegar a creer religiosamente en las cosas, sino llegar a comprenderlas, a aprehenderlas.
Bastará con que nos demos el tiempo suficiente para entenderlo y sobre todo para practicarlo, ya que así veremos que efectivamente se cumple. Además, será importante saber en qué modalidad se cumple para cada uno de nosotros, porque no a todos nos hace bien exactamente la misma música, ni la misma comida, ni las mismas costumbres. Es un trabajo de investigación necesario que cada persona se debe a si misma.

Como vemos, para finalizar, la mente al despertar de un sueño, efectivamente, puede llegar a comportarse como el mono que decíamos al principio, porque su poder es mucho. Si juega demasiado, si se entretiene demasiado con los efectos y las situaciones pasajeras del mundo, quedará también demasiado prendada a los fenómenos de los cuerpos físico, pránico y astral.
Nuestra mente juega, pero no es culpable . Ni siquiera el cuerpo astral es culpable de su torpeza. Así como no podemos culpar a un animal por no ser racional, tampoco podemos culpar a nuestro cuerpo astral por tampoco serlo.
Pero está en nuestras manos domesticarlo, o por el contrario dejar que obre a su antojo. Si elegimos el segundo camino, el más fácil en apariencia, el resultado será dolor y preocupación, no nos convendrá. Porque podemos aspirar a un bien muchísimo más alto y más digno que la vida solamente astral, que es la espiritualidad que guarda para nosotros el cofre de toda felicidad.

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