According to Osho, sleep is samadhi: a dreamless, conscious rest where the body relaxes while the inner being remains fully alert, like a steady candle in a windless room. In true sleep there is no repression-driven dreaming; awareness continues unchanged from waking to night. Sleep rejuvenates the body, not the witness, which never sleeps; the awakened simply watch the body’s quiet restoration.
Sleep rests your body while, deep inside, a calm inner light can stay quietly awake.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, I don’t see dreams in sleep, yet it feels as if I haven’t slept for many days. At the slightest disturbance the body wakes up, as if I had been awake all along. But I don’t feel tired, and the hours of sleep seem to slip away. Please tell me what this state is?
Good, auspicious; do not be afraid. Dreams will slowly disappear. When the witness is awake, dreams cannot be. If there is dreaming, there cannot be witnessing. Good. The dream has fallen away; a sense of wakefulness remains through the night. Gradually it will deepen and grow denser; swiftness and intensity will come. The witness becomes keen—like the edge of a sword. But in the beginning there will be difficulty. We believe that eight hours of sleep are necessary—this is a notion—and then what is this that is happening? The whole night seems to pass as if awake. And if you remain “as if awake” for eight hours, the night feels very long, as if it will never end. If you sleep, you forget; you do not know when the night began or ended. You sleep and it is morning. But now it feels as if all night it remained morning;…
A friend has asked: Osho, if through meditation or spiritual practice one can conquer death, does not the same state occur in sleep? And if it does, why can’t death be conquered through sleep?
But meditation and hypnosis are not the same. Understand me carefully. I said: up to this point it is hypnosis, mesmerism—so long as we are manufacturing suggestions. When the manufacturing of suggestions stops and you awaken—where awareness begins—there meditation begins. Where witnessing begins, meditation begins. And the reason for this hypnosis is that you have fallen into a reverse hypnosis. In scientific language, this is not hypnosis but de-hypnosis. Not mesmerism, but the breaking of mesmerism. We are the ones mesmerized—but we don’t know it. In life we have become hypnotized, and we have no idea how many kinds of hypnotic trances we have taken on, by how many devices we have produced them. A large part of our life is hypnosis. And when we want to be hypnotized, we don’t notice what we are doing. For example… we live like this all our lives. If we became aware of…
Beloved Osho, what is sleep for you? Do you leave your body while it is resting or does sleep help you to stay in your body?
Prem Shunyo, asleep or awake, my consciousness is in the same state. To me, sleep is samadhi. That's how Patanjali explains samadhi: a sleep without dreams; a sleep which is not unconscious, which is not like a coma, but simply a light rest for the body. But deep inside, the inner being is fully alert ... just like a candle burning all night in a dark room, where no wind comes in. It remains unwavering but goes on radiating light. I don't feel any difference in my sleep or in my awakening. The same light and the same blissfulness and the same silence continues day in, day out. My sleep is not much of a sleep, just a thin layer of rest for the body. Inside I am all awake. You are asking, "Do you leave your body while it is resting or does sleep help you to stay in…
Is sleep a state of aloneness?
No. Sleep as it exists is not aloneness. It is not oneness, it is not twoness, it is just unconsciousness. You are unconscious of that which is. In ordinary wakefulness you are conscious of the two. In ordinary sleep you are not conscious of oneness nor are you conscious of twoness. But in real wakefulness -- in meditation, in samadhi -- you are conscious of aloneness. There is a similarity and there is a difference also. In sleep, you are unaware of the two but not aware of the one; in samadhi, in meditation, you are aware of it. If you can become totally aware and there is no twoness -- as in sleep there is not -- then oneness happens. In sleep the mind goes to sleep. In samadhi the mind dies. So sleep and samadhi appear to be similar but they are not, because after samadhi there is…
If you all sleep here tonight—so long as you are awake, there may be some differences; once asleep, all difference disappears. One and the same sleep descends upon all. If someone were to inspect each face—he would find only one taste: of sleep. However he investigates—women will be sleeping, men sleeping; children sleeping, old people sleeping; the healthy sleeping, the ill sleeping; the ugly and the beautiful sleeping; the poor and the rich sleeping; the worldly and the sannyasin sleeping—but the sleep is alike. The taste of sleep is one: unconsciousness. So too happens in the supreme awakening. Whoever awakens—their taste is one. Certainly their words differ—Krishna spoke in Sanskrit, the Buddha in Pali, Mahavira in Prakrit, Jesus in Aramaic, Mohammed in Arabic; languages differ, cups of different colors and shapes from different lands and times—but the taste is one. And the one who recognizes this taste—he alone is religious.