Sutra 1.10. Coming Back to Nidra. Can Dreams be Referred to as a Form of Vritti?

I hope the reader remembers that in one of previous posts we have considered the category of nidra and explained why nidra had been highlighted by Patanjali as a vritti. However recently I’ve been asked about whether a dream, a night fantasy, can be referred to as a form of vritti. Since I believe the question to be proper I shall answer it briefly here with parallel consideration of some additional aspects associated with this topic.

Let us start with actualization of what dreams are from the point of psychology. I think most of the readers paid attention to the fact that dreaming is related to current situations that are emotionally significant. Upon resorting to the works of Jung and Freud – and one’s own experience as well – we can specify this point in the following way: the dream in symbolic form “shows” a person some information about an actual emotionally significant situation that the person is not conscious of (or the one that he/she represses), and about the core point of this situation.

Sutra 1.17. Meditation in the Context of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

The word “meditation” is one of the brands that the mass consciousness has inseparably linked to yoga, spiritual practices and person’s development. And this opinion is justified: yoga is not yoga without psycho-practices, since it was yet in Hatha Yoga Pradipika that they wrote that “All the methods of hatha are meant for gaining success in Raja-yoga”. But what is it that we can actually refer to as meditation? There is no such word in Sanskrit, though it is actively used by Indian Schools of today. Moreover, in scope of closer investigation of the issue we see that they apply the word ‘meditation’ to a whole range of psychical activities that differ both in their essence and in their results. In addition to this we also see that the theme is evidently getting more and more “popular”. Most people who considered themselves to have been practicing meditation failed to answer my three simple questions: “What is the target?”, “What is the method?” and “What comes as the object?” The situation in some way reminds the already told story about one’s “dharana” on the carton box. Or some even more absurd “practices” similar to those used by naïve attendees of the trainings made out of thin air, like: put the picture of the car of your dream on the fridge door and spend 15 minutes of your day staring at it and hoping that one day it will “appear” in your life.