Consider the fact that you will sleep for approximately one-third of your life. Yet you do not, nor do many others, take this fact with the utmost seriousness.

You think that sleep is just a void of sorts, one, all the same, that is necessary for the restoration of the body and mind. Sleep, a trap door through which you fall, is the servant of waking life.

But you do not know what goes on in sleep, what happens to you in sleep, and whether sleep might be different from what you think. Where do you go? What happens there? Who is that to whom something happens or doesn’t happen?

You think that waking life is the realest state of all. Here, there is a world of objects set apart from you, the body-mind posing as a subject. Here, thoughts, sensations, feelings, and perceptions are all clear and distinct. You think that in waking life you are in control of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions. You rest assured in your ignorance.

The trouble is not just that you don’t know this but also that you don’t know what you don’t know. Hence, your privileging of the waking life over the dream and dreamless states only goes to show your prior commitment to (a) being a separate self and to (b) seeing the separate self realizing itself in the form of work.

But, oh, what folly!

Could it be that sleep is more than what restores the body and the mind? Could the dream and dreamless modes of being actually be more ontologically real that the waking state? Could the waking state actually be the dream from which we need to awake?

The fact is that you don’t know and that you’re not yet in a position to investigate these questions. You keep passing off one-third of your life by ceding all ground to the purported Doer operating in the waking state.

Reject Total Work. Then see whether this rejection opens you up to the possibility that dream and dreamless modes of being may have ontological priority over the waking state. Then we can start talking seriously about lucid dreaming and dream yoga.