Now dreams seem long: we only discover afterwards and by accident their almost incredible brevity. May we not—must we not—infer from this that the body is an organ of many stops and more than one keyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. The theory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts in part for the great longing for sleep. "What is it that is much desired by man, but which they know not while possessing?" again asks Leonardo. "It is sleep," is his answer. This longing for sleep is more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings is less of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstand the deprivation of food and water longer and better than the deprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondingly greater.
Experiments have been made with mature University students by which they have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experiments were finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a long sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more time than was regular with him. And this has been the experience over and over again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awake for long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation in which they have been placed.
In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of the time sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantable assumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep must be as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, the ratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it would seem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the time element of consciousness.
THE EASTERN TEACHING IN REGARD TO SLEEP AND DREAMS
In this matter of the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment, of sleep and dreams, the most modern psychology and the most ancient wisdom meet on common ground. Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon the problems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—the gross, the subtle and the pure. In the waking state—that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate to materiality—the individual self is as a captive in a citadel of flesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances to enact itself before the windows of his prison. In the dream state, when the more violent vibrations of the body are stilled in sleep, consciousness becomes active in its subtle (four-dimensional) vehicle, and ranges free throughout the ampler spaces of this subtler world. In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition—the individual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longer prismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes the pure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into the primordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, no longer "besprent with seven-hued circumstance," is swallowed up in duration.
"There are two paths for him, within and without, and they both turn back in a day and a night…. After having subdued by sleep all that belongs to the body, he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping. Having assumed light, he goes again to his place, the golden person, the lonely bird" UPANISHADS.
SPACE IN DREAMS
However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the waking state, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really one of inhibition—that the world is only a "shoal of time"—it is curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to special objects and particular persons—these things form insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit perfectly with the Eastern idea that "he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping." And to the questions, "How, and from whence?" in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, "By the curvature of time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension."
Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to account for some of the dream experiences recorded in Human Personality, since he asks for "an intermediate conception of space—something between space as we know it in the material world and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world." He suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that "intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by our hypothesis.