Dreaming (Skt. स्वप्न Swapna) is a natural state of experience in which the mind is engaged with purely non-physical contents, completely independent of the physical senses and the external world.

The Dreaming State (Swapna)

• Withdrawal from Senses: In the dreaming state, the physical body is relaxed and paralyzed, and attention is withdrawn from the gross senses.

• Creative Projections: The mind constructs its own vast, volatile environments, people, and events using imagination, memory, and randomness.

• Fading Memories: While dreaming, the memory is active and the experience feels completely real. However, upon waking, these experiences fade quickly because they are stored in a temporary buffer memory rather than the main long-term storage.

Lucid Dreaming and Projections

• Lucid Dreaming: An advanced state of dreaming where the dreamer becomes fully aware that they are dreaming while the state is in progress. The mind regains all the logical, rational, and memory-bridge capabilities of the waking state, turning the dream into a "wish-fulfilling zone" where the environment can be manipulated at will.

• Spontaneous Projections: Glimpses of deeper layers of the universal memory that occur without intention, where the dreamer experiences a high degree of realism and encounters independent entities beyond their own mind's creation.

Waking State as a Dream

On the path of knowledge, the waking state is also recognized as a projected dream of the mind. The only difference is that the waking dream has more physical rules, stability, and consensus. The experiencer remains the same, unchanging witness across all states — waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.

See also

Waking state, deep sleep, memory, senses, experiencer, illusion.