Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

NIGHT BLINDNESS
met only with a sputtering restlessness that conceals an under -
lying exhaustion. Beyond damaging our waking conscious ness,
the use of counterfeit energies further damages our nights
by disrupting nature’s essential rhythm of activity and rest.
But we can take something for it. Evening appears to be the
most common period of substance and medication use in our
world. We consume vast amounts of alcohol, marijuana, anti -
depressants, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers to modulate our
restless waking energies, and, even more so, to blunt our uneasy
encounter with dusk and darkness. These substances may help
us temporarily negotiate our discomfort with night, but only at
a terrible cost. Many of us routinely view the night only through
bleary eyes.
Unfortunately, what is called sleep medicine – that branch
of the health sciences specialised to treat sleep disorders –
offers little help with our night blindness. By tightly framing
night, sleep, and dreams as strictly objective and scientific
phenomena, sleep specialists drain these experiences of
anything personal or subjective, let alone sacred or spiritual.
Sadly, sleep medicine also segregates sleep from her biological
sib, dreaming, consigning the latter to status of unappreciated
stepchild. (It is, after all, sleep medicine, not sleep and dream
medicine.) Most sleep specialists relegate what is left of night
to autonomic mechanisms – reducing sleeping and dreaming to
molecular machinations that are about as personally meaningful
as recharging a battery.
Viewed through such a narrow and rigid lens, sleep and
dreams become experiences we believe we can and must manip -
ulate and control. We seek medical and mechanical solutions to
what are essentially lifestyle and consciousness problems. In lieu
of an honest confrontation with our frenetic drive and fear of
darkness, we are offered a tantalising array of designer sleeping
and waking pills. In bed with the pharmaceutical industry, sleep
medicine itself remains in a fitful, dream-deprived sleep.
More than three decades ago Andrew Weil called our
attention to the concept of night-time consciousness. In his book
The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, he explored the innate,
universal human drive to experience nonordinary forms of con -
sciousness. To balance our ordinary waking, daytime, or “solar
consciousness,” Dr. Weil encouraged us to intentionally open
to a darker, more mysterious night, or “lunar consciousness.”
Lunar, or night consciousness, encompasses sleep and dreams
but also includes dark or shadowy aspects of waking awareness.
As a culture, we have failed to achieve the necessary
balance between these separate but equally important realms
of consciousness. “Like night and day,” solar and lunar conscious -
nesses have become increasingly polarised. Daylight is dominant,
overvalued, and even deified, while darkness is dismissed,
devalued, and often demonised. From divine light to light beer,
things associated with the metaphor of light suggest goodness.
We want to shed light, see the light, and lighten up. Our
associations with metaphoric darkness, on the other hand, are
suggestive of confusion, struggle, immorality, and outright evil.
We want nothing more than to avoid dark times, dark nights
of the soul, and, of course, the dreaded “prince of darkness.”
Our struggle with night is ultimately a struggle with denied
aspects of our own darkness. Confusing the literal darkness of
night with the metaphoric darkness of life, we blindly project
our feelings about the latter onto the former. We then mitigate
our fear of darkness through the excessive use of evening light,
effectively extending daytime’s custody deep into the night and
seriously eroding our night consciousness. Indoors and out, our
nights are lit up beyond reason – beyond what necessity and
safety might dictate. Like a frightened child, the planet sleeps
with its lights on.
In the end, sleep and dream disorders are largely symptomatic
of this deeper fear of night and its damaging segregation from
day. In our attempt to excise darkness from our lives, our very
consciousness has been cleaved. With the loss of night, day loses
its partner in the sacred dance of circadian cycles. Adam loses
Eve. Yin is torn from yang. And activity becomes dangerously
devoid of rest. We lose our sense of the basic pulse of night
and day – our precious awareness of life’s natural rhythms.
Ultimately, we lose our experience of the lovely, seamless
continuity of consciousness, our sense of oneness.
Night-mindedness
Nyx, the forgotten primordial Greek goddess of night, pictured
on the cover of this book, is calling for resurrection. And there
are unexpected gifts to be found in the dusk and darkness she
brings, if we choose to be more night-minded. Night has been
celebrated and sanctified with rich social and sacred rituals across
cultures and time. Whether it is the initial transition through dusk,
the experience of sleeping and dreaming, or the coming of dawn
and awakening, each phase of night offers sacred and healing
possibilities. And, as we will see, a more honest relationship with
night also offers vital lessons about our need to rest by day.
Perhaps the greatest gift of becoming more night-minded
is the restoration of a kind of night vision – a fundamentally
different way of seeing or perceiving. Because sleeping, dreaming,
and awakening are non-ordinary states of consciousness, their
exploration calls for non-ordinary ways of perceiving – a kind
of nocturnal lucidity. Nocturnal is a way of seeing in the dark,
a kind of third-eye sightedness. We can clearly see night only
through such a spiritual wide-angle lens. And when applied
to our view of day, this expanded frame restores a sense of the
big picture to our lives. It restores the numinous.
Having survived the Holocaust, my mother learned to dis -
tinguish the literal darkness of night from metaphoric darkness
– what has been referred to as shadow. Certainly one does not
have to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, or anguish in
any form, to receive the gifts of night. They are available to all.
Night itself is the best sleep medicine. We cannot heal our
sleep and dream disorders without first healing relationship with
night. And in healing night, we discover that night itself is healing.
Darkness is a healing retreat, a carbon filter for the soul. If we
surrender to it, the night will inhale our shadowy fears, offering
precious personal insights in return. Beyond all of the psycho -
logical and biomedical complexities associated with it, we come
to discover that sleep itself is a spiritual path, dreaming a means
of walking this path, and awakening its gracious gift. We come
to learn that there is something we can safely place our faith
in – even in the dark.n
Rubin R. Naiman is a psychologist and clinical assistant professor
of medicine at the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Centre.
email: rrnaiman@gmail.com
YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015
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