There is a current controversy in the Golden Domes of Fairfield, Iowa that involves falling asleep during meditation. Apparently some TM-Sidhas who are financially encouraged to do their meditation program in the domes are falling asleep and have been described as dozing for dollars.
I will not comment on the controversy of whether or not to keep track of who is falling asleep in the Golden Domes. Instead I will discuss my experience of falling asleep during TM in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
I used to use the phrase “conking out” to describe the way I sometimes fell asleep while practicing TM in the afternoon. Conking out is falling asleep while not realizing that you are about to fall asleep. I would start meditating and be aware that I was meditating for a while, but then the next thing I realized is that my chin and head were down on my chest and that I had been asleep.
I did not like the way I felt after falling asleep in TM. I would feel groggy afterwards.
The instruction that TM teachers commonly gave for sleep in TM was to meditate for 5 minutes when you wake up before getting back into activity. This instruction didn’t work for me because I would fall asleep again when meditating for an additional 5 minutes.
In retrospect, I think that falling asleep in TM may have indicated that I had been meditating too much and meditating was no longer healthy for me.
There are many different degrees of being ungrounded and not being at optimum health. Eventually I became so ungrounded that I had a kundalini crisis. My experiences of falling asleep in TM may have been an early warning sign that I was overdoing TM.
My Enlightenment Delusion 