Let’s start our exploration and analysis from the state of least consciousness, the inertia of deep sleep, and proceed through levels of increasing wakefulness to the fully awakened state of complete enlightenment.

We are all familiar with being awake, asleep, and dreaming. It’s about as fundamental an aspect of our lives as anything could be, and science has quite a thorough grasp of what goes on in our bodies and brains during these states.

Subjectively, when we are asleep, we have no experience of anything; there is no perception at all, no thinking, no sensory awareness—nothing. Physiologically, myriad processes of healing, refreshment, and rejuvenation are going on, but from the standpoint of Consciousness, there’s not much to talk about.

When we dream, we experience an often fantastical reality that could take us anywhere. Probably the most common term to describe the dream state is that it is “illusory”—from the perspective of physical reality, what happens in the dream state is simply unreal. Anything can happen. We may be exploring the surface of Mars, a tiger may be about to pounce, some thwarted waking-state desire may be getting fulfilled, but then we wake up and we say, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real.” It had its own reality in the dream state, but that reality is different from the reality both of deep sleep, where nothing is happening, and the wakeful state. It is not transferable. That is, it takes a dream-state weapon to stop the pouncing dream-state tiger; a “real” rifle will not help, nor would a dream-state rifle avail for a real-world tiger.

Each state of consciousness is its own universe with its own rules. Or, as Maharishi used to emphasize, “Reality is different in different states of consciousness.”