How to sleep
Shavasana
If you sleep without a pillow or with a very low pillow, which doesn’t allow the spine to get pinched, the neuronal regeneration of the brain and the cellular regeneration of the neurological system will be much better. If you sleep without a pillow, it is best to lie on your back in a supine position, rather than on your side.
Lying in this position is referred to in yoga as shavasana: it enhances the purification and rejuvenation of the body, promotes the free flow of movement in the energy system, bringing relaxation and vitality. But there is no reason to get dogmatic about this.
(At least in your sleep, don’t take a position!).
Extreme experiment with sleep
If you are aware at the moment of death, you will be aware beyond death also. Start practicing with sleep. Sleep is nothing but temporary death. Every night you are presented with a tremendous possibility—the possibility of becoming aware of the dimension beyond death.
At the moment that you move from wakefulness to sleep, make an attempt to be aware. If you can be aware of the last moment when you make the transition from wakefulness to sleep, you will be aware throughout your sleep.
You will see it is a lot of work. So here is another thing you can do. If you are used to waking up to an alarm, substitute it with a sound, a tune, or chant that reminds you of your awareness. You can easily train yourself to make this association. It can become an alarm for your awareness.
Of course, you cannot use an alarm to go to sleep! But the fact of the matter is that unless you completely dis-identify from your body, it is not easy to move consciously from wakefulness to sleep. The first possible moment that you come awake, see if you can become consciously aware of something—your breath or your body, for instance. This will help you later when you want to go to bed.
If you achieve waking with awareness and moving from wakefulness to sleep in awareness, you are deathless. This means that when it comes to shedding your body, you will do it in full awareness. Even getting close to that moment will change the way your body and mind function and will alter the quality of your life quite phenomenally.
Truth is not a conclusion
Start by paying attention to everything you think of as yourself just before you fall asleep: your thoughts, your emotions, your hair, your skin, your clothes, your makeup. Know that none of this is you.
There is no need to make any conclusion about what ‘you’ are or what ‘truth’ is. Truth is not a conclusion. If you keep the false conclusions at bay, truth will dawn. It is like your experience of the night: the sun has not gone; it is just that the planet is looking the other way. You’re thinking, reading, talking about the self because you’re too busy looking the other way! You haven’t paid enough attention to know what the self really is.
What is needed is not a conclusion, but a turnaround. If you manage to enter sleep with this awareness, it will be significant. Since there is no external interference in sleep, this will grow into a powerful experience. Over time, you will enter a dimension beyond all accumulations.