Have you ever been drifting off to sleep and jolted awake by a sudden jerk, as if you had missed a step? Most people have.

The tradition of Gnosis gives a simple reason for it. When the body sleeps, the part of you that thinks, feels and wants does not stay in bed. It leaves the body in a subtler body, the astral body, and goes elsewhere. Until a true astral body is built (page 46), it is the subtle body nature gives everyone, and it still goes out every night. The jerk is that body snapping back as you hover at the edge of sleep.

This happens to everyone, every night. It is nothing strange and nothing dangerous. It is part of how the body rests. Without your worries and reactions inside it, the body breathes deeply and repairs itself.

So the problem is not that you leave. The problem is that you leave asleep. You take your waking habits with you. The same selves that ran your day run your night, and you follow them through dreams like a sleepwalker.

The aim of this part, then, is not to make you go out. You already do. The aim is to be there when it happens.

That begins with something very small: the moment of waking, while the night is still close.