Aurobindo On Dreams

There's a book that I got a number of years ago that I have so far been unable to read. I've worked on it, sometimes seriously, and then it sets on the shelf for a couple years, then I pick it up again and pick up where I left off.

It is called "The Life Divine" by Sri Aurobindo. It's a monster sized book, with over 1100 pages. And it is thick in more ways than one. Sri Aurobindo wrote beautifully, but he wrote with the most involved, convoluted prose I think I've ever seen. I would guess he learned his English from some upper crust British, being in India and all, and he has the longest, thickest sentences I can imagine.

I like him though. I first heard of him when I had an anthology of Indian philosophy, which I got at a bookstore for free because it had been rained on and was in a free box. I read his chapters and underlined a bunch of stuff that seemed very impressive. It was a joy to get this book, like in 2001, but it turned into a drudgery when I actually went to read it.

Today, though, I was looking at it again. It had the same effect on me, which was to make me immediately drowsy. But there was some good stuff on dreams. It's around page 438, in there, worth reading if you have a copy. He touches on what we usually think of dreams, how unsubstantial they are and how they're taken as a state of consciousness inferior to our normal waking consciousness. He explores why that might not be, and gets very flowery (in a scholarly way) in describing some of the aspects of this perhaps alternate consciousness.

He writes about it with interesting words like the subconscient, our subliminal selves, antechambers or substratums of the subconscious element, the inconscient, etc. But you pile up too many words like that, along with his very long sentences, and you're busy dreaming yourself.