With intangible breath in center of forehead, as this reaches heart at the moment of sleep, have direction over dreams and over death itself.
- Three requirements: (1) be able to feel prana — the intangible, invisible content of breath (easiest if already centered at the third eye; also possible at the breath-gap or at the navel, with less ease); (2) practice ONLY at the moment of falling asleep, no other time; (3) as sleep overtakes you, keep feeling prana arriving at the heart with each breath, and let sleep drown you while you hold that feeling unbroken.
- Mechanism: in sleep the eyes naturally turn up and fix at the third eye, which collapses the gap between dream and reality — that is why dreams feel fully real and you only realize ‘I was dreaming’ on waking. Carry an unbroken thread of prana-awareness through the sleep threshold and you stay conscious inside the dream: you know you are dreaming while dreaming.
- Result 1 — mastery of dreams: dreaming becomes voluntary (you can will a dream to come or not come). Deeper consequence: once you are master, involuntary dreaming ceases — there is no longer any need for it. Dreaming keeps sleep superficial; you cling to the surface through dreams.
- Result 2 — without dreaming you drop into the depth of sleep, which is qualitatively identical to death. Sleep is a day-to-day death; death is a life-to-life sleep — each morning you wake reborn; after a full life you need the great sleep of death to return in a wholly new body.
- Result 3 — direction over death and rebirth: having known dreamless sleep consciously and known death as sleep, you can direct your next birth (parents, time, form). Demonstration: in his life before his last, Buddha declared the exact dream-sequence his future mother would have, that she would be standing under a palm tree at his birth, and that he would take seven steps at once — all fulfilled; the Jain Tirthankaras gave similar pre-birth declarations.
- Pre-death marker for those who can feel prana: about six months before death the prana-flow REVERSES — the incoming breath arrives empty (the body can no longer absorb prana) and the outgoing breath carries prana out. The vehicle (air) is unchanged; only the content reverses. This is how saints announce their death date in advance.
- Q1, first complementary method: hold ‘this is a dream’ about everything you experience while awake; do NOT try to change anything, simply remember continuously. After about three weeks, mid-dream you will suddenly remember ‘this is a dream.’ Mechanism: dreams feel real only because the daytime attitude ‘this is real’ carries into sleep — reverse the attitude by day and the reversal carries over too. It is a device, not a claim about the world.
- Q1, second complementary method: throughout all activity feel ‘I am’ as a continuous inner presence — FEEL your own being (present in the touching, in the eating), do NOT verbally repeat it (verbal repetition induces sleep/boredom, not awareness). Sustaining it even one full minute is rare. After about three months it becomes spontaneous, inner dreaming stops, and the so-called real world is seen as dream. Mechanism: the dream is felt as real only because self-remembering is missing; remember ‘I am’ and the dream is exposed as dream and you wake at your own center.