If you can become aware of dreams, you can do two things. You can create dreams – one. Ordinarily you cannot create dreams. How impotent man is! You cannot even create dreams. If you want to dream a particular thing you cannot dream it; it is not in your hands. How powerless man is! Even dreams cannot be created.

 

You are just a victim of dreams, not the creator. A dream happens to you; you cannot do anything. Neither can you stop it nor can you create it. But if you move into sleep remembering the heart being filled with prana, continuously being touched by prana with every breath, you will become a master of your dreams – and this is a rare mastery.

 

Then you can dream whatsoever dreams you like. Just note while you are falling asleep that ”I want to dream this dream,” and that dream will come to you. Just say, while falling asleep, ”I do not want to dream that dream,” and that dream cannot enter your mind.

 

But what is the use of becoming the master of your dreaming? Isn’t it useless? No, it is not useless. Once you become master of your dreams you will never dream – it is absurd. When you are master of your dreams, dreaming stops; there is no need for it. And when dreaming stops, your sleep has a different quality altogether, and the quality is the same as of death.

 

Death is deep sleep. If your sleep can become as deep as death, that means there will be no dreaming. Dreaming creates superficiality in sleep. You move on the surface because of the dreams; because of hanging on to the dreams, you move on the surface. When there is no dreaming you just drop into the sea, its depth is reached.

 

Death is the same. That is why people in India have always been saying that sleep is a short duration of death, and death is a long sleep – qualitatively they are the same. Sleep is a day-to-day death. Death is a life-to-life phenomenon, a life-to-life sleep. Every day you are tired. You fall into sleep and you regain your vitality, your aliveness in the morning; you are reborn. After a life of seventy or eighty years you are tired completely.

 

Now such short durations of death won’t do; you need a great death. After that great death or great sleep, you are reborn with a totally new body. Once you can know dreamless sleep and can be aware in it, then there will be no fear of death. No one has ever died, no one can die – that is the only impossibility.

 

Just a day before I was telling you that death is the only certainty, and now I say to you that death is impossible. No one has ever died and no one can die – that is the only impossibility – because the universe is life. You are again and again reborn, but the sleep is so deep that you forget your old identity. Your mind is washed clean of the memories.

 

Think of it in this way. Today you are going to sleep: it is just as if there were some mechanism – and soon we will have this – like that which can erase on a tape recorder, which can wipe a tape clean so that whatsoever was recorded is no more there. The same is possible with memory, because memory is really just a deep recording. Sooner or later we will have a mechanism which can be put on the head and it will clean your mind completely.

 

In the morning you will no longer be the same person because you won’t be able to remember who it was who went to sleep. Then your sleep will look like death. There will be a discontinuity; you won’t be able to remember who went to sleep. This is happening naturally. When you die and you are reborn, you cannot remember who died. You start again.

 

- Osho, "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1, #5"