The Lack of Transcription or Bridges of Consciousness Prevents Awareness of the Waking Consciousness of Experiences of Deep Sleep and Other Alternative States of Awareness

Where does the consciousness go when we are deep asleep? Numerous reports tell us that it can go out to other planes or realms, or down into subconscious levels, or up into superconscious levels. When we awaken from sleep, we generally are unable to describe what we did during sleep or where we went, or what happened to us while we were asleep.

There are other statuses of consciousness into which an individual can enter, and, upon returning to his waking consciousness, which he cannot describe. For examples, certain hypnotic states, trance states, certain states of coma, certain states of physical trauma. Clearly the consciousness remains alive and the waking consciousness can and generally is reinstated following these various states (assuming that the coma or trauma are not permanent or lead to death).

What they all seem to have in common is that the consciousness departs, temporarily, from the waking ego-personality. In certain of these states, such as in the trance known as samadhi, consciousness is aware and concentrated. Yet when the individual shifts from the trance to the waking state, as also in the transition from deep sleep to waking, he does not generally remember, or if he does remember, he cannot adequately describe the experiences as he does not have the words or the conceptual framework to translate the experience of one realm or status into another.

In some cases, when he retains some memory of the state he experienced, he is forced to use imagery or poetic language to try to convey what happened. In other cases, the experience was traumatic in some way that causes him to block it out of his conscious awareness. In yet other instances, he is given a message or teaching that he is asked to disseminate.

In her book Out on a Limb, Shirley Maclaine recounted several experiences with psychics who could channel other personalities while in a certain type of trance state. They could not remember what occurred during that state, while the channeled presence, if it returned at a later period of time, had total recall of the events of the prior occasion.

An individual reported that after diong some extensive chanting and deep meditation practice, he entered another state of awareness which he could not describe. He felt, somehow, that if he continued and went any further, he would dissolve. He could not tell exactly what had occurred, or where he had gone in his awareness, only that he experienced fear. Reading later reports of others he identified the status of the ego-awareness recognising that its dissolution was going to occur if he kept going. It was not about physical death but ego-death.

Another aspect of the discussion revolves around what are known as ‘out of body experiences’, ‘near death experiences’ or ‘astral travel’. The individual, in such instances, generally returns with a quite detailed remembrance of his experience and can recount it as to what he saw, what he heard, what he felt, what he experienced. Somehow in these cases the waking consciousness maintains a type of ‘bridge’ to the alternative awareness state.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The sleep you describe in which there is a luminous silence or else the sleep in which there is Ananda in the cells, these are obviously the best states. The other hours, those of which you are unconscious, may be spells of a deep slumber in which you have got out of the physical into the mental, vital or other planes. You say you were unconscious, but it may simply be that you do not remember what happened; for in coming back there is a sort of turning over of the consciousness, a transition or reversal, in which everything experienced in sleep except perhaps the last happening of all or else one that was very impressive, recedes from the physical consciousness and all becomes as if a blank. There is another blank state, a state of inertia, not only blank, but heavy and unremembering; but that is when one goes deeply and crassly into the subconscient; this subterranean plunge is very undesirable, obscuring, lowering, often fatiguing rather than restful, the reverse of the luminous silence.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pg. 102