A Simple Intro to Baháʼí-inspired Sleep Meditation

Drawing on Baháʼí Prayer and the Writings for Restful and Enlightening sleep, part 1

Many of us can probably vividly remember the feeling of being young enough to still have an early bedtime, but old enough to know just how special it was to stay up late. Maybe it was seeing your older siblings getting to stay up later that made your skin prickle with envy, or you intuited that conversations got much more interesting after a certain hour. You knew about and looked forward to those ‘privileges’, but were still too young to grasp them yourself quite yet.

At times I tried to arrange to stay up later with my parents, my mom would recall wagers with her father when she was young, begging to stay up. His crafty response was: “If you lay down with the lights out and are still awake within an hour, you can come out and join us”. I tried this myself. Invariably, no matter my best efforts, it wouldn’t be long before I slipped into the replenishing, careless, and dream-filled sleep so common in childhood. My mom said the same thing always happened to her. Of course, it never occurred to me that having such a full night’s sleep would be something my future self and many others would look at with great envy!

Envying the Blissful Sleep of Childhood

Growing into my teenage years I loved to stay awake late into the night, writing out song ideas and poetry, working on projects, or having meaningful ‘late-night’ conversations with friends. I was (and still am) a true night owl. But I certainly did love to sleep, and dreams became a huge source of inspiration, comfort, and even spiritual exploration.

The realization of how valuable sleep is truly dawned on me during my teenage years when I dealt with long bouts of insomnia. The norm at that time was for me to lay awake in bed for hours upon hours, often taking 3 or more hours to fall asleep. This was something I’d been dealing with on and off since even as early as sixth grade but worsened dramatically in my high school years. It seemed no matter what I did, no matter what time I went to sleep, my mind was too active and kept me awake (and this was before I ever drank coffee). Half the time I would just give in and stay up to spend my time doing other things (being creative, reading, or just wasting time with TV and video games). I knew I wouldn’t be asleep at a normal time anyways, so I thought, why bother?

One such night, during the summer when I was 14 or 15, I was so fed up with another night of restlessness, that after laying in bed for several hours unable to sleep I decided to spend the night reading the Writings. I flipped open Tablets of Baha’u’llah and turned to the Súriy-i-Vafá and read for the first time:

“Behold how the thing which thou hast seen in thy dream is, after a considerable lapse of time, fully realized.”

I was blown away! This was something that had occurred many times for me up to that point. Sometimes I chalked it up to deja vu but it had happened often enough that I really began to wonder. I had even experienced some surprising personal revelations in the space of dreams around that time of life.

I eagerly read on:

“the world in which thou livest is different and apart from that which thou hast experienced in thy dream. This latter world hath neither beginning nor end. It would be true if thou wert to contend that this same world is, as decreed by the All-Glorious and Almighty God, within thy proper self and is wrapped up within thee. It would equally be true to maintain that thy spirit, having transcended the limitations of sleep and having stripped itself of all earthly attachment, hath, by the act of God, been made to traverse a realm which lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this world.” - Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 187-188

I was hooked.

I read everything in the Writings I could find about dreaming, sleep, and meditation and went on to explore many other traditions and religions and their contributions on this topic. By the end of the summer, through trial and error and extensive digging around on the internet, I’d crafted a reliable routine of nightly dream meditation practices that allowed me to conquer the bouts of insomnia I faced at that time, practices I’ve returned to many times ever since that have had tremendous impacts in my life.

Our Troubled Relationship with Sleep

I wish I could say I’ve always kept up with those practices, but just as with most positive habits and practices in life, they’ve ebbed and flowed based on what’s going on with life at various times (college, first job, grad school, first baby, etc.). We live in an era where sleep is treated like a commodity, to be exchanged in favor of whatever seeming incentive offered, ignorant of just how disruptive this can be to our health and wellness. This mentality also causes us to sacrifice other foundational life practices (meditation, mindfulness, seclusion, quietude). Modern life is like the New York Stock Exchange for ‘Faustian bargains’.

With the breakneck pace of contemporary culture, and our minds so bombarded with stimulation throughout the day, I’m sure I’m not the only one who sometimes feels pangs of guilt about not setting aside enough time for these practices of mindfulness, prayer, and contemplation. But this isn’t just a personal failure. The very social structuring of modern life pushes us to the brink of exhaustion and burnout in pursuit of ‘life priorities’. Ironically, in our rush to face these supposed ‘priorities’, we haphazardly do away with the foundational practices that spiritually and physically sustain us, undermining the core of our spiritual and physical well-being.

Of course, I don’t want this to be another source of guilt or provide a vague list of ‘tricks’ or ‘hacks’ that just lead to more worry. Rather, I want to propose a simple pathway of spiritual sustenance that has been rewarding in my life as a counterbalance to the type of modern culture that has us quite literally hacking away at our health and well-being in pursuit of things that are ultimately of lesser importance.

The best part is that it works no matter whether you feel you have enough time in your day, week, or month for extra devotion to spiritual growth.

We all have the same number of hours in a day or week, but what if I told you that you could reclaim untold hours of fruitful time for contemplation and growth, just by attending to some critical practices related to your life of sleep?

First, A Powerful Conceptual Shift

It starts with a simple conceptual switch: too many of us are conditioned to equate ‘life’ with what we do when we are awake. We consider our useful hours as those hours of wakefulness during the day, chip further and further away at our night’s rest, and at best consider it a tool to enhance our daytime hours. Do away with this distinction.

Upon reflection, it’s no surprise that our ‘productivity’ obsessed culture would look down on sleep, rest, and repose as ‘wasted time’. So step one is reframing (and reclaiming) our approach to this part of our life.

The truth is every hour of our time, and more importantly, how we spend it in each moment contributes to the whole. This includes when we are asleep and especially when we are dreaming. Thinking of your time as your ‘waking life’ and your ‘dreaming life’, all part of one whole, can help you realize that a massive portion of your life—26 years of the average human life span, to be specific—has gone almost unnoticed and unvalued.

Promisingly, the scientific literature in recent years has started to recognize many of the more profound benefits of sleep. We’re learning more about how essential sleep is to our physical and mental health and many have begun to buck the trend of burning our life away in pursuit of empty goals. Key among these scientific advances is that different phases of sleep are now better recognized for their unique contributions to physical recovery, deep rest, memory processing and consolidation, learning, and much more. We stand to gain a lot just from attending to how sleep affects diverse arenas of life, from exercise to depression, from learning to recovery from illness.

But approaching our sleeping life with higher intention can also provide an expansion in our ability to navigate life’s spiritual tests and difficulties, not to mention, that it can also be a great source of joy and renewal. Our dreaming life has much to teach us about our inner psyche, our deeper motivations, yearnings, hopes, and aspirations, and drives a lot of our personal advancement in subtle ways.

These processes of contemplation are already going on underneath the surface: we actively react to daily life throughout our nighttime repose, and the thoughts in our mind before going to sleep have a strong impact on the quality of sleep and the content of our dreams—in fact, this is occurring constantly whether or not you recognize it or remember your dreams the next morning or after. There’s a feedback loop here. The more we investigate and open our eyes (metaphorically) to what goes on in our night’s sleep, the more we’ll realize an entire world of significance, meaning, and possibility lies underneath the surface.

Spiritual and mystical traditions have long recognized the fascinating potential of our dreams and the nighttime hours of our lives. There is a huge world here that we could only begin to scratch the surface in just one post, and there is more to come on this in future posts. I’ve already touched on one excerpt from the Baháʼí Writings on dreams, but there is much more.

The long tradition of Tibetan Buddhist ‘dream yoga’ is a particularly significant major body of practices and one that I’ve spent the most time with.¹ It was responsible for helping me overcome the sleeplessness during my teenage years that I talked about earlier.

The practices of ‘yoga nidra’ that have become popular in recent years are another popular source, as are ‘lucid dreaming’ techniques that are widespread in popular literature and internet communities. There are also expansive and thoughtful explorations in the Western and Islamic esoteric traditions (Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Islamic philosophy, mysticism, and others) and a range of relevant Baháʼí’ understandings I hope to explore in future posts. There are extensive practices and protocols you can learn and experiment with from across all these traditions.

With these things in mind, the question then is: where do we even begin?Luckily there are already many established resources, both secular and spiritual, and even a growing array of tools (oura ring, sleep timer, guided sleep meditation apps, smart watches, etc.) that might aid you in your path. But to get started I want to share a simple and ageless tool that you’re likely already familiar with: nightly prayer.

Reconsidering the Power of Prayer

Together in our communities, Baháʼí’s around the world are already engaged in a learning process around what prayer looks like on an individual and collective level. Through service and community action, we’re seeing the fruits that come from building the ‘devotional character’ of our neighborhoods and praying alongside our families, friends, and community members. We learn fundamental features of prayer: how it is a ‘ladder for our ascent’, that it can “burn away the veils” of separation from God. When we translate this into collective worship, we can draw on prayer to impel progress in our community life and witness the beauty it brings to community relations.

Although we are asked to pray morning and evening, it seems we mostly think of these powers of prayer in relation to our waking life. We actively pray for success for our families, friends, and for our personal endeavors; we pray to overcome inhibitions and strengthen our virtues. We pray for prayer’s sake, because it’s beneficial for us, and maybe, for God’s sake alone.

But if we think about it in light of that holistic shift in thinking we posed earlier, these are just as relevant to our sleeping life as well. Seeing prayer in this manner, our evening, pre-sleep prayers take on a whole new significance, as do our morning, post-sleep prayers. They are not merely thoughts and wishes for a new day, but are actually preparation for sleep and ‘hygiene’ for our soul’s journey inward during the nighttime. We can pray for spiritually illuminating dreams, we can pray for restfulness and recovery, and for spiritual exploration during our sleep. After all, our body may be at rest but our souls never cease activity. What a remarkable shift in thinking this provokes! As we’ll see in future posts, this is directly supported by quotes from the Baháʼí’ Writing on the topic of sleep and prayer.

With some of these thoughts in mind, I want to offer a simple nightly routine to help heighten our intentions as we pray before sleep:

A Simple Sleep Meditation Practice

Falling Asleep

1. Beginning in the hour before bedtime, start thinking about your night’s sleep, and how you hope to have fulfilling dreams tonight. As it turns out, the very act of thinking about and attending to sleep and dreams is a powerful trigger to your mind that makes you more likely to remember your dreams and promote illuminating dreams. Try to build excitement about the possibilities of new understandings that might come, or how the joy from dreams can give you a good start to the next day.

2. Select a prayer or meaningful quote to meditate on before sleep. It can be about any topic, especially those that have been most interesting to you as of late. Pray in your preferred manner. The last topics or thoughts on your mind before you sleep have a powerful influence on your night’s dream activity, so reserve the selected prayer/quote as the last reading before lying down to sleep.

3. Read the quote or prayer and meditate and reflect on it. Then select a short section, either a phrase or a line from that reading you find particularly interesting. As you make yourself comfortable and fall into sleep, repeat (‘make mention’) this line or phrase to yourself as you fall asleep.² You can also intersperse short accompanying phrases such as:

   1. ‘I will dream hopeful/joyful/meaningful/rejuvenating [whatever is most relevant that night] dreams tonight’

   2. or ‘Baha’u’llah/’Abdu’l-Baha, please aid me in dreaming tonight’

   3. Draw on the Greatest Name (Allah’u’Abha) or other such phrases and repeat it as you drift to sleep

Waking Up

When you wake up, take a moment to lightly reflect on how you feel. Perhaps you will remember distinct dreams, be in wonder over a fantastical dream narrative you experienced, or even feel joy or sadness from being visited by the memory of old friends or lost loved ones. Or you may feel just an array of indistinct emotions. These are all to be expected. Whatever you feel, take notes on a piece of paper or in a dedicated journal (a ‘sleep’ or ‘dream journal’), as the act of writing down your dreams will steadily increase how much you remember each night (you can even end up remembering 3 or more distinct, full-fledged dreams each night!).

As you incorporate this practice into your nightly prayer routine, you will begin to see a connection between your daily moods and experiences and the content of your dreams. You may also begin to notice more acutely how your activities before bed (eating late, too much screen time vs calm reading or dedicated meditation) can influence how you feel after a night’s rest and affect the quality of your day. Ideally, these practices will reinforce a broad feeling of rest and repose in your life and can stimulate deep spiritual reflections. It takes discipline, but you’re already sleeping every single night anyway, so you might as well make it more meaningful. At the ‘cost’ of practically no extra time in your day, you can open up a whole new world of significance in your life.

Conclusion

I hope this can become an enlivening practice and will help open new doors of spiritual investigation! As I’ve focused on healthy and fulfilling sleep over the years, I’ve marveled at how intentional sleep hygiene can alleviate the feeling of being “stretched thin” that so many of us feel in contemporary life. At the very least it can lead to a fuller appreciation of how active our mind and spirit really are when we are supposedly at rest. These and other practices can be an amazing pathway to new spiritual insight and a new kind of ‘awakening’ that you may not have appreciated before in life.

If you’re craving more, join me in part two for a ‘virtual’ prayer visit as we dive into further writings on these topics, including analysis of prayer from the ‘Evening’ section of the Baha’i Prayer book.

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1. The book “Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep” by Andrew Holecek is an absolutely fantastic single-resource tour through Tibetan dream yoga approaches alongside Western lucid dreaming techniques and some features of experimental psychology as it relates to dreaming.

2. This practice is called dhikr or zikr [ذکر] which can be understood as ‘Remembrance’, or ‘making mention’, calling to mind or an invocation, and it is an extremely meaningful concept. One aspect of this concept is a spiritual devotional practice with origins in Islamic mysticism, often making use of frequent repetitions of especially impactful verses or phrases. The repetition of ‘Allah-u-Abha’ (God is Most Glorious) 95 times, prescribed in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, is an example of the obligatory practice of dhikr. In Sufi practice repetition is often turned to, sometimes going into the hundreds and hundreds, and the Báb was especially fond of prescribing this practice. While these practices can be spiritually beneficial, the Báb made it clear that what is most important thing is sincerity and focus on the Revealed Word: “Let not thy tongue pay lip service in praise of God while thy heart be not attuned to the exalted Summit of Glory, and the Focal Point of communion… if He appeareth while thou hast turned unto thyself in meditation, this shall not profit thee, unless thou shalt mention His Name by words He hath revealed” (Persian Bayán 9:4, Selections from the Writings of the Báb, pp. 120-121). Reference to the concept is replete throughout the Writings. Whenever you see phrases in prayers such as “remembrance of Thee [dhikruka] is my remedy” (from the ‘short healing prayer’) or “where mention of God [dhikr-ullah] hath been made” (from ‘Blessed is the spot’), these are often references to this concept. It’s also worth noting that the term Mashriqu’l-Adhkár, a pivotal concept concerning the Houses of Worship central to Baha’i community life, is connected to this dhikr, as adhkár is the plural form of dhikr.