Sleep Responsibly

The Universe will thank you.

Walk like a pigeon, sit like a turtle, sleep like a dog — Li Ching-Yuen.

1. Crossing the Threshold

If death was really so scary, you would fall asleep terrified every night.

Your astral body leaves your physical body and sojourns in the astral realms, and even higher planes, each time you fall fast asleep. Your astral body is tightly bound to your Ego, your higher self. This “ I ” is a spiritual being whose home is in the upper realms. This is one reason you don’t feel so scared each night.

Crossing the astral boundary is very “noisy”, there’s lots of crashing like thunder, so you only cross this threshold once you are asleep and your senses have been disconnected.

Unless, of course, you are a clairvoyant initiate like Rudolf Steiner, who went through this experience completely consciously on a daily basis. Most of the information here comes from Steiner, I will tell you when it doesn’t.

Shortly after you fall asleep, you go through a period of rapid eye movement or REM sleep. This event is called Rückschau in German, the backward review of the day. You are actually watching a very fast reverse movie of everything that’s happened to you since you woke up in bed that morning. Your eyes are quickly scanning the action of your waking life.

When REM sleep has stopped and you are snoring, there’s a good chance that your astral body has literally left the building. The slumbering physical body and its underlying etheric body remain closely united on the bed. Just as the physical body needs to rest and repair itself, the etheric body also needs to recover from the stresses of interacting with the oft-agitated astral body all day.

The etheric body is the platform that interfaces between the astral software and the physical hardware, and records all the interactions. It has a lot of work to do.

There is a very big riddle in biology, one they’ve covered up. In the embryo, let’s say you have two stem cells side by side. They are undifferentiated, they haven’t yet “decided” what kinds of cells they’re going to become. One of them eventually turns into a liver cell. The one right next to it becomes an epithelial cell, part of the liver lining. How does each cell know which type to become?

A British biologist called Conrad Hal Waddington coined the term “epigenetic landscape” to describe how these cells differentiate. This landscape shows dynamics similar to water flowing down a structured mountain. There are watersheds upon watersheds, with a drop falling on one side of the line ending up in the Atlantic Ocean and a drop on the other side flowing to the Indian Ocean.

The further word Waddington used to describe this underlying landscape was “blueprint”. He said of epigenesis that it’s uncannily like there’s an underlying dynamic blueprint that tells each cell what to do, which way to flow, what to become.

Go and look for that kind of “blueprint” language in the contemporary literature on epigenetics. You won’t find it. They have swept this inconvenient truth very far under the rug. They know it looks exactly as though there’s some kind of blueprint underlying the physical body of living beings, telling each cell which way to go, but they haven’t got the faintest clue what this blueprint is. So they keep quiet.

What Waddington was describing is exactly the etheric body. It is a subtle form, undetectable by any physical apparatus, although its effects can be seen in crystallization patterns. It is the same as Qi in traditional Chinese medicine. There is a dynamic formative structure underlying your physical body, underlying the physical body of all living plants and animals, telling each cell what to do. Your physical body remains tightly bound to this etheric body until death.

Your etheric body is in particular the repository of all your memories, accessed by being “read” by the astral body. Your etheric body is highly dynamic, regulating the activity of every cell in your body in real time, and registering every event that occurs to you in the outside world. In truth, the etheric body is the “scroll of your life”, the indelible record of your existence.

The etheric can be displaced from the physical for a moment by a bad fall or a near-drowning. People who have had such near-death experiences often report seeing a tableau of their lives stretching back into the past. This is the etheric body.

In a more immediate way, if you get a bad cramp, or cut off circulation to a part of your body and it goes totally numb, this means the etheric body has actually separated from that part. Steiner says that if someone’s leg “falls asleep”, the clairvoyant can see the etheric leg drifting to the side. The “pins and needles” you experience as the limb comes back to life is the etheric body reconnecting.

So give your physical and etheric bodies a well-deserved break. Sleep deeply and let your astral self and Ego go play and receive instruction in their home territory on the other side of the threshold.

Pro tip: the astral body has no gender. The astral body has no sense of space or time. It can cheerfully mix up people you know in this life with people you knew in previous lives, even with people you are going to meet in future lives.

You get a very garbled account of the astral body’s adventures before you wake, but this account often does not make much sense down here on Earth when the alarm clock rings and you wake up. These picture postcards from the astral realm are called dreams. Their downloading during sleep coincides with another period of REM as you scan the mysterious doings of the night, the same way you previously scanned the more prosaic terrestrial doings of the day.

If you crash-land back on Earth straight from the higher realms of Devachan, above the astral plane, you will know all about it. You are carried into these higher realms on billowing waves of music and rhythm, and it is on billowing waves of music and rhythm that you return. If you ever wake up with rhythms resounding so loudly in your soul that your entire being is ringing like a cathedral bell, you will know that you have just been in the deepest and most protected regions of sleep. You have been in another world entirely.

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2. Do Your Own Damn Review

One of the most basic exercises you can perform, in order to make the smoothest transition from waking to sleep, is to do your own Rückschau just before you cross over the threshold.

In your mind’s eye, lying in bed, run the events of the day backwards — the night, the evening, the afternoon, the morning, all the main happenings. See if there was anything you could have handled better, anything you said that might have hurt somebody’s feelings or caused distress. Try to understand and integrate the lessons of the day. You may decide to phone someone the next morning to apologize. You might even phone before you go to sleep.

This will make the REM Rückschau that you experience after you fall asleep much easier. You’ve already reviewed the material and done your best to understand and integrate these experiences. There should not be anything that stresses or surprises your system as you undergo the REM review of the day.

There’s a very big benefit that comes from doing this waking Rückschau. Your astral body is the bearer of your karma, the effects of all your deeds. These deeds can pursue you into the next life and the next, if they demand compensation. It is much, much better to sort out your issues now, while they’re fresh in your mind, than have to come back and deal with them in another life, when you don’t even know what they are and have to blunder around until you find out the hard way. That is truly tedious.

Most people are incapable of looking really honestly at their own behaviour and their interactions with the world. There’s nothing more important in life, however. Try this review experiment and see if you sleep a little better. View your life as if you were an outsider, watching those events happen to someone else. Try to be truly objective in your assessment of your experiences.

When you die, after beholding the tapestry of your life that is your etheric body for about three days, you then travel backwards through all the astral experiences you had in your sleeping life. Since you spend about one-third of your life asleep, this extended review lasts about one-third of your earthly life. If you died at age 60, your life review will last about 20 years, as you go back systematically through all the nights of your life and see what actually happened to you:

A man then passes through a period — lasting about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally spent in sleep — when he experiences his nights again, but in a backward direction. So he lives through his last night first, then the night before, and so on right back to the time of his birth and conception.

There is absolutely nothing you can do to change your karma once you are dead. Here on Earth is the only place where you can exercise willpower and achieve material compensation. The more you understand about what’s ahead of you, the more you can do right now to reduce your karmic burden.

So do your own damn review of your business on this Earth and do it well. Your soul will thank you in the afterlife.

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3. The Moment of Waking

The most sacred moment of the day is that moment when we wake up. Falling asleep is actually equally sacred, but of course we’re asleep straight after, so we don’t capture that moment so well.

As far as possible, you should wake up in quiet, tranquil conditions, preferably with no light or even the faintest of sounds. Keeping the bedroom dark also stimulates your pineal gland to release melatonin, which promotes sleep and helps repair the body, reducing cancer risks. You can use eye masks if your bedroom isn’t dark.

The shadowy experiences of dream consciousness are completely swamped by the sense impressions of the day. I find the slightest noise dissolves most of the dream experiences that I know are in there somewhere.

I used to have extremely vivid and clear dreams, I have nearly 20 years’ worth of comprehensive dream diaries. One really detailed dream took 14 foolscap pages to record. It was about all the Scientologists leaving the planet on a big spacecraft, with people running around and an alarm siren blaring throughout, it was very weird. I used to keep a notebook by my bed and write these dreams down straight after waking.

Right now, my dreams are much more muted, but they are still there. I wake up with a lot of birds singing, which I love, but which often chases the dreams away. My goal for 2026 is to get my meditation back in rhythm, I’ve had a very disrupted time lately. Meditation is the key to an active and constructive dream life.

In particular, Rudolf Steiner says that the moment of waking is when the dead can whisper messages to us. He says that if you even have the vaguest premonition that something was being said to you, don’t talk about it even to yourself. Just let it play inside your soul. You may have the same feeling again a few mornings later and it will slowly grow into a proper experience that you can hold on to.

The student knows very well, on waking, that he has had an experience, but is completely in the dark as regards its nature. The most important thing during this initial stage is to remain quiet and composed, and not for a moment lapse into any unrest or impatience. The latter is under all circumstances detrimental; it can never accelerate development, but only delays it. The student must cultivate a quiet and yielding receptivity for the gift that is presented to him; all violence must be repressed.

I’ve had some profound experiences of this kind and they are a very great consolation in this hard life. We will talk more about communicating with the dead at the end of this essay, when I discuss my sure-fire cure for insomnia.

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4. Lucid Dreams and Continuity of Consciousness

Having experienced a few vivid lucid dreams, I’m convinced that it’s not a good thing to try and work to achieve these in your sleep. When you are intended to have a lucid dream, you will have that dream, never fear.

However, the whole discipline of meditation is actually aimed at achieving a type of lucid dreaming. Meditation is the best way to approach these experiences. One of the first exercises in Steiner’s seminal little book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment is to practise creating thought pictures of anything you want and then wiping them clear from your mind at will. This way you learn to understand and control the picture-making apparatus of your soul. The mind’s eye not only sees, but can deliberately create what it sees.

These practices lead you into the world of Imagination, the formation of living images, where you can begin to distinguish between your own mental creations and objective spiritual realities. Particularly valuable is creating pictures of things that do not exist in nature, so that you are aware that these are truly supersensible images with no counterpart in the physical world.

Steiner maintained that it was studying geometry that first trained him to create such supersensible images. Just contemplating a shimmering triangle will do the trick.

I’ve been doing this kind of exercise for decades, with variable success. But there are moments when a curtain in my mind draws back and I have a brief but brilliant vision, usually accompanied by a burst of celestial music. I am more attuned to sounds than to images generally.

A chapter in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is titled “Continuity of Consciousness”. As a person begins the ascent to higher knowledge:

His dreams lose their meaningless, irregular and disconnected character and form themselves more and more into a world of law and order. With continued development, not only does this new world born out of the dream world come to be in no way inferior to outer physical reality as regards its inner truth, but facts reveal themselves in it representing a higher reality in the fullest sense of the word. (…) True, he must not regard these revelations as actual knowledge so long as the same things do not also reveal themselves during ordinary waking life. But in time he achieves this as well: he develops this faculty of carrying over into waking consciousness the condition he created for himself out of dream life. Thus something new is introduced into the world of his senses that enriches it.

Someone once had a whole philosophy of life worked out from the song Row Your Boat. It was quite deep. The first thing is — you row your boat, you are active. The second thing is — you row down the stream, gently. This is very good advice in life: don’t go against the flow of existence and don’t thrash about, go easy. The third thing is to do it all merrily. As Hamlet said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” So think cheerfully and stay merry as you journey with the river.

The result — “Life is but a dream.”

Is there a danger of losing your grip on reality this way? If you follow Steiner’s simple but clear instructions, you can actually only increase your overall consciousness of reality, by learning to discern your own dream creations from objective spiritual experiences. Steiner said it’s like learning to walk on a tightrope — the skills you acquire on the high wire can only help you with your ordinary walking on Earth.

In a separate essay, I mentioned a book called The Master of Lucid Dreams by the psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi. She meets an urban shaman called Michael in the city of Samarkand, who teaches her to tackle transgenerational “spirits of trauma” via lucid dreaming.

How do you tackle a trauma when it didn’t even occur to you? Or it occurred in a previous existence and you’re not consciously aware of it at any level? It is only in your dream life that you can deal with issues like this.

Whatever happens, face your dreams with equanimity. After all, they are just dreams. However, if you have a terrible nightmare and you internalize the karmic lesson it teaches, it may mean that you do not have to have this experience in real life. Think about that. I’ve had some horrible nightmares over the years. None of them came true. In fact, I’ve come to take a nightmare as a sign that something is not going to happen, if I take care to heed its message.

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5. The Rhythms of Sleeping and Waking

There was a quirky question on Quora a while back: “What is the easiest concept in physics?”

As a long-time physics teacher, an answer jumped to mind. I’ve always found the concept of inertia easy to teach. I would tell my students: You know that feeling when you’re warm in bed and it’s cold outside, and you feel like staying just where you are? That’s inertia, I told them. It’s a fundamental principle of physics that things like to stay exactly where they are, and it takes an unbalanced external force to shift them.

In other words, when you have that morning feeling and don’t feel like budging, you are totally in tune with the Universe. The kids always loved that.

Sleeping patterns are completely individual. Many people aim for eight hours of unbroken sleep each night. Others will catnap during the day and be able to function right through the night, like Winston Churchill, who would exhaust his officers and generals in this way.

One of the most interesting perspectives I’ve seen on the rhythms of sleep comes from a book called Seth Speaks. This is chanelled material, which is normally completely out of bounds in Steiner’s scientific approach, in which all information has to be captured in full waking consciousness. The author Jane Roberts would go into a trance and channel the voice of a disembodied entity called Seth, who described himself as a literal ghostwriter. Seth had a very good sense of humour.

I find the Seth information to be very interesting and powerful, and I was glad to find a strong essay supporting this material written by an expert on Rudolf Steiner, the late Stanley Messenger, who wondered whether it was our failure to grasp Steiner’s message that meant that Seth had to come through: “One can ask whether any of this remarkable teaching would have been needed if we had really listened to Rudolf Steiner earlier on.”

Seth goes into great detail about sleep and insists that too long a period of sleep makes you stiff and sluggish:

Persons vary in the amount of sleep they need, and no pill will ever allow them to
dispense with sleep entirely, for too much work is done in that state. However, this
could be done far more effectively with two, rather than one, sleep periods of lesser duration.
Two periods of three hours apiece would be quite sufficient for most people, if the
proper suggestions were given before sleep — suggestions that would ensure the body's complete recuperation. In many cases ten hours sleep, for example, is actually disadvantageous, resulting in a sluggishness both of mind and body. In this case the spirit has simply been away from the body for too long a time, resulting in a loss of muscular flexibility.

In the past, before electric lighting changed all our habits, people used to sleep in two instalments quite regularly. They would wake up in the night and be active, gather around the table, chat, have a light meal even, and then go back to bed for the second episode of sleep. It’s known as the medieval two-step sleep cycle. References to “first sleep” and “second sleep” are common in accounts of medieval life.

You might find it worthwhile experimenting with this, basically sleeping when you feel like it, instead of following an automatic routine. Sleeping and waking states should follow each other in a natural rhythm, like a pendulum swinging.

Steiner makes an important point in this regard:

The rhythm between sleeping and waking comes about because the human soul has need of the continually recurring meeting with the spiritual world. If we were to say we want to sleep and consequently feel tired … we should be speaking more correctly than when we say that because we are tired, we must sleep.

We sleep because we want to sleep, we enjoy it, it refreshes us. We don’t sleep because we’re “tired”. We start feeling tired because we want to sleep.

This is a very important dynamic. If you’re suffering from insomnia, doing strenuous manual labour or any other work is not necessarily going to help you fall asleep, no matter how your muscles ache. Your body may become stimulated by all that activity.

Try to get in touch with your natural sleeping and waking rhythms. There is nothing more important than rhythm in life. The founder of Weleda pharmaceuticals with Steiner, Rudolf Hauschka, tells in his autobiography how he went around asking all the great minds he could find: “What is the meaning of life, especially in relation to healing?” He stopped Rudolf Steiner quite rudely in a corridor, as a complete stranger, and asked him this question.

Steiner replied without hesitation, “Study the rhythms, rhythm is the bearer of life.” This became Hauschka’s life’s work.

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6. The cure for insomnia plus protection from pandemics

I suffered badly from insomnia as a small child, I would often lie awake for hours at night. As a teenager, however, I would drink coffee as a nightcap and sleep like a log.

As a professional scientific editor, I often have insane deadlines and find myself working frantically through the night. My sleeping patterns can be very erratic.

However, my normal way of falling asleep is to listen to audio versions of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures. I can safely say this is the surest and quickest method I’ve ever found of crossing that threshold into sound sleep.

I’m not alone. In this video, the Waldorf School expert Dr Douglas Gabriel describes the practice of “reading to the dead” that Steiner advocates, to help people who have recently deceased navigate the afterlife. Gabriel talks especially about reading them Steiner’s book Between Death and Rebirth, which explains to the dead what is happening to them. He says (about 16 minutes into the video) — this will also put the person reading the book straight to sleep, it’s happened to him many times.

Every now and then it fails, and I spend the night listening to a whole lecture cycle. But nineteen times out of twenty, I am knocked out and fast asleep within a few minutes of the lecture beginning. The more I try to concentrate, the more certain it is that I will pass out.

However, there’s another reason to fall asleep with such thoughts passing through your mind. In a compendium called On Epidemics, you can find this Steiner quote about surviving a pandemic of disease:

Bacteria flourish most intensively when we take nothing but materialistic thoughts into sleep with us. There is no better way to encourage them to flourish than to enter sleep with only materialistic ideas... The only other method that is just as good is to live in the center of an epidemic or endemic illness and to think of nothing but the sickness all around, filled only with a fear of getting sick. That would be equally effective. If fear of the illness is the only thing created in such a place and one goes to sleep at night with that thought, it produces afterimages, Imaginations impregnated with fear. That is a good method of cultivating and nurturing bacteria.

In other words, fear and materialistic thoughts weaken the human system and allow bacteria to flourish. This is why I like to fall asleep with spiritual thoughts passing through my mind. Also, listening to a detailed account of what you are going to experience when you die is actually a very good way of overcoming what is often a great source of fear for people. In reading to the dead, there is nothing you can do to remove the dead person’s karma, but if they understand a little bit of what’s happening to them, the process becomes much less stressful and lonely. And they may whisper a “thank you” just as you are waking up.

As for not taking material thoughts with you into sleep — I watched a video in which you are warned never to leave your wallet lying on your bed. Don’t contaminate your sacred space with material concerns. I actually thought this was very sound advice.

With all the stresses and strains we are facing in the world right now, I can’t think of a single thing more important for people than healthy, sound sleep. One of the first Steiner sayings I saw, decades ago, was “Sleep responsibly”, and I’ve taken this to heart. I can’t find that quote now, so I made it the title of this piece.

If you sleep responsibly, and don’t arrive in the spiritual world ragged, drugged out, angry, fearful — the Universe will thank you. As above, so below: there’s turmoil across all realms right now. Anything you can do to achieve balance and rhythm is not just a blessing for you, but for the whole world.

Sweet dreams.

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