Yoga Nidra.

Wednesday 11:49 p.m.
I think the last pose you tend to do at a yoga class is called savasana. It's the corpse pose. Anybody can do this one! You lie flat out and surrender to the floor. Yoga Nidra seems to be like that except it takes a bit longer. If you've had a baby, you might know the routine. They do stuff like this at pre-natal classes. It's a relaxation exercise. Tell your hand to relax, then your wrist, and so on.

I had a wonderful dream on Monday night and wakened up at half three. I don't think I went to sleep again. After about an hour I sat up and meditated for about an hour or so, and then lay down again, and got back into this yoga nidra stuff.

Yoga Nidra might be known as the sleep of the yogis because, apparently, some yogis don't sleep. You're body is supposed to be asleep, but not your mind. But if you have trouble sleeping, get yourself a yoga nidra tape/CD or whatever. Knock you right off.

Once you've relaxed all your bits, you come up from your feet and tell the bits to go to sleep .... anyway, by then I've got my eyes closed and I'm pretty blissed. It's light and blissy. I'm telling myself that when I go to sleep and start to dream, I'll know I'm dreaming. But all I got was the bliss and some tiny fragments of dreams arising and declining again.

Years ago, I said to thisjoe: You know that bit when you're kinda between being asleep and being awake and you've kind of lost the location of your body, like you don't know where your arms and legs are? The joe replied: No.

When you start to meditate, after a while (this happened to moi after a week at ten minutes or so a day) you might find yourself in a mental space which is quite nice and recognised as unusual and new. You think ... you think anything at all and it's gone. At least, this is when you know there's a fish in the water somewhere and you can start fishing. When the great leviathan of bliss swallows you, you can think if you like and thoughts ... arise in bliss, abide in bliss, decline in bliss.

I had a great idea for a novel in this state. Unfortunately, it wasn't the novel I'm hardly writing at the moment. It was the schoolgirl novel. I'll have to wait till I leave the jobbie because the last time I tried to write anything about the jobbie it kept making me really annoyed. But I will have to write the schoolgirl one some day!