Dream Energy

One of the strongest impacts Kundalini has on me concerns the way I sleep and the falling-asleep and waking-up processes, and I wonder if other people have experienced the same thing.

During the day Kundalini strips away anxieties, irritations and fears. When Kundalini’s at hand, it’s easy to see, almost visually, a big package of angst or negativity welling up from your stomach and to simply look away from it and let it turn into simple, pure energy, part of the continuum. Kundalini certainly improves task-oriented functioning as well as clarifying one’s position in the world at large.

At night, asleep, the energy’s just as strong, but it works differently. For the last couple of years I’ve been waking up to find myself pinned to the bed by a sort of shining stillness. There are no thoughts or feelings, just a bright force holding me still in the position that I’ve happened to wake up in (either flat on my back, or mostly on my right side, stretched out fully, not curled up). If I’ve got to go to work, be on the train in twenty minutes, think about placing an order with the builders’ merchants, tell my customers I need some more money — this stillness gets wasted. But since I’ve been back in Thailand with my wife and only teaching two days a week, I’ve been able to let this waking stillness, breathing very slowly and deeply, Kundalini intense and bright, take its own course and take hold of me. It usually lasts for about an hour. I have the feeling that I haven’t dreamed much, or at all, during the night (though, of course, it’s hard to say for sure) and that this bright stillness is dream energy, the subtle energy that would normally have gone into dreaming, but which has stayed in its raw, unmanifested state and hasn’t somehow allowed my brain to make dream narratives, faces, or places out of it. I checked this out in some books and believe that this bright still energy is what in Tantra is called tejas.

After an hour or so the stillness starts to burn, the Kundalini heat becomes more intense, thoughts start up, and at a certain point I reach a sort of overload, and it’s time to get up. But what then becomes crucial is that this prone, lying-down state of the last hour gets balanced by some uprightness and concentration. So, after a wash and ten minutes on the balcony getting used to looking at things again (mountains, a river, a singlet used to clean the floor) and listening to things (birds, insects, someone panel beating up on the highway), I sit in straight-backed, upright meditation for another hour. The stillness and the Kundalini are much the same but, for me, there’s something vital about being centred and upright (not lying down any more.) In alchemy, the prone position, symbolised by a horizontal line represents the Waters and Cosmic Female and the upright position, symbolised by a vertical line, represents Fire and the Cosmic Male. I have a hunch that there’s a lot in this and would be interested to know whether other people have experienced this same altered relationship between sleep and wakefulness once Kundalini is activated.