Sleep, especially deep sleep, is the source of the multitude of confusion in spirituality, and I was confused about it also. This confusion stems from terms like Turiya (the fourth state), Turiyatita (beyond the fourth) and also from Yogic tradition (oh, fucking yogis, they confuse everyone with their body tricks!). Ken Wilber also famously confused the hell out of everybody with this.

Some enlightened people who are still dreaming in the Brahmanic body claim that they experience awareness in deep sleep. They don’t. I had these experiences, these are temporary, deep sleep is by definition unknowable, but it’s easy to imagine you have known it.

But, there’s a very true saying that awareness is unchanging and penetrates even deep sleep. How could it be? Simple. It’s just because no one loses awareness during deep sleep. No one.

How do I know this? Invite me to your home, fall asleep, and when you are in the deepest state of deep sleep, I will bang on your head with a stick. See? Awareness! Lol.

When you are in deep sleep, the mind and all your senses are not active. So there is nothing that can “know” that you’re aware, by definition. But it doesn’t mean that you’re not aware, otherwise you would not react to the stick.

There is no knowing in deep sleep, there cannot be. If there always is some knowing, it just means you don’t allow your mind to rest. But most likely, it means that you only imagine there is some, because you cannot actually tell when your mind is in deep sleep, there’s nothing to tell it with.

What people usually refer to when they speak of awareness in deep sleep is the state at the boundary of sleep, when all objects of cognition are absent but waking consciousness is still not. This is a very important state for keeping your spiritual practice. The more conscious you are, the deeper this state will appear to be. You kinda “dissolve” into sleep, consciously. The more stuff exists in your unconscious still, the more abrupt falling asleep will feel like. So falling asleep consciously is a very good practice.

This state is impossible to imagine by a person in the separated state, because it’s not accessible before self-realization. A person in the separated state usually doesn’t even remember in the morning exactly how and when he fell asleep. It just kinda happens, pretty abruptly. This state can roughly be described as complete nothingness where nothing is present except the recognition of nothingness, but this recognition is not done with words, but rather nothingness recognizes nothingness. In other words, pure consciousness, without objects of perception, and with no awareness or minimal awareness of the body. One could also experience deeper and deeper relaxation of muscle tissue as one slowly moves into this state. It can be extremely pleasurable.

Sometimes in this consciousness a stray thought may run through, an image or two. Sometimes a dream could begin in it, and if you recognize it as such, it will most likely cease. Or you may watch it knowing it’s just the mind dreaming. Dreaming usually ceases eventually. Without any activity of the mind, and even with some, this experience is blissful and peaceful. But for a mind in the separated state, it would appear extremely scary (this is what people call “sleep paralysis”). But this is still not deep sleep. In deep sleep, consciousness disappears. But it doesn’t mean you’re not aware.

What does tend to happen in enlightened people is that their sleep does becomes conscious, but not in the sense that they experience consciousness for the whole duration of the night, but that in all other states excluding deep sleep, it is present. So the falling asleep process is slow and conscious. Losing body awareness as one falls asleep is also slow and conscious. Regaining it in the morning is slow and conscious. Any activity of the mind, if there’s any dreaming or thoughts, is also conscious. And any movement during sleep, for example, changing position is also conscious. If one moves during sleep and it takes several minutes to go back to deep sleep again, these several minutes are also conscious and there’s some diminished body awareness there along with a mostly idle mind. You can also become aware when your partner wakes up to pee, for example. It just means that you emerged from deep sleep into a lighter sleep, have no body awareness but aware of the activity in your surroundings, such as noises, and you re-submerge into the deep sleep again when it’s gone.

Sleeping truly “consciously”, that is, maintaining some minimal body awareness, including, usually, awareness of the breath, which is sometimes described as yogic sleep (damn you, yogis!), is actually not sleep, it’s meditation. This is how I nap, but I wouldn’t call it a nap - it’s just resting the body while remaining conscious with an idle mind. Similar to what happens on the periphery of sleep as I described above. One could call it “light sleep” also. Or “using Samadhi as a resting point” as Jos Buurman mentioned Ajahn Maha Boowa did. If there are moments of deep sleep in such nap, you will not know it.

So, ultimately Turiya is simply the recognition of the boundless awareness that is always present, across all states, but this recognition itself can only happen in the waking state, dreaming state, and the sleep boundary/light sleep state.

Turiyatita is when this recognition is no longer there, because it has been fully integrated, and it is seen that there was nothing to recognize in the first place, so “boundless awareness”, as the last percept of the dreaming mind, is itself discarded.