5 Contemplative sleep states

In my target article, I called attention to the importance of meditative practices of dream yoga and lucid dreamless sleep, because they are closely connected to the Advaita Vedānta, Yoga, and Indian Buddhist conceptions of dreamless sleep, and have begun to be investigated by cognitive neuroscientists (see Thompson 2015b for further discussion). I agree with Windt that these practices may be too remote from other kinds of sleep experiences in order to justify a wholesale revision of the standard taxonomy of sleep states. For this reason, it is important to place these meditative sleep states within a wider taxonomy that includes other kinds of sleep states, specifically the dreamless sleep states that Windt details. In this way, the meditative practices and their effects on sleep can be integrated into the rest of sleep science. Windt’s article provides an excellent framework to this end.