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.

Sutra 3.1. Conceptual Mistakes in Understanding the Category of “Dharana” by Yogis of Today. A Psychologist’s Opinion

Instead of drawing an epigraph I shall cite an anecdote.

A man is walking along the city streets and sees a queer picture: two workmen with spades are walking one by one. One is digging a pit, the second one is filling the pit up. This makes our man astonished, and so he asks them: “why do you do it this way – one of you digs a pit and the second one fills it up?” And receives the answer from the second one: “I am not the second one, I am the third one. The second one has fallen ill. He was supposed to plant trees”.

In the would-be yogic environment of today the understanding of the category of “Dharana” (just like of many other basic categories as well) in many aspects resembles the situation described in this anecdote. If one small detail is missing, the entire activity becomes totally meaningless. I shall further expand my idea.

As I have already mentioned in one of the previous articles, Patanjali has given a fairly precise definition of Dharana category:

Sutras 1.10 - 1.11. Vrittis: Nidra and Smriti

Let us proceed to discussing the two latter Vrittis mentioned by Patanjali: smriti and nidra. 

In one of the previous sections of our forum we have already considered and slammed the traditional interpretation of these two words as memory and sleep. I shall remind here that in order to preserve the text consistency in terms of understanding vrittis as the states that the Inner Observer merges with we have translated the respective words as memories and dreams. Let us now verify the validity of our ideas basing upon the definitions of these categories contained directly within Yoga Sutra.

Nidra

अभावप्रत्ययालम्बना वृत्तिर्निद्रा ॥ १०॥

1.10. abhāva-pratyayālambanā vṛttir nidrā