When Vishnu Slept and the World Dissolved
The cosmic night; the Goddess is Yoga-nidra, the sleep itself. The comfortable sleep you do not want to wake from.
At the end of a world, everything dissolves into one dark ocean where Vishnu lies asleep on the cosmic serpent and the sleep itself is the Goddess as Yoga-nidra. Watched over by Mahakali, the dark dissolving power, this is the great cosmic night, and a mirror of the heavy, comfortable sleep of inertia that a person can lie in for years.
The Night with No Stars
Before the first act of creation, there is a night. Not the night that follows a day, but the great night that swallows a whole world when its time is done. The tradition calls it pralaya, the dissolving. The mountains and the rivers, the gods, the living and the dead, all of it softens and sinks and returns to a single dark water. There is no sun to rise over it and no shore for it to break on. There is only one endless ocean, still in every direction.
On that water, something floats. A vast serpent, coiled into a raft of its own body, drifts on the swell. And on the serpent, at rest, lies Vishnu, the preserver of worlds, deep asleep. His slow breathing is the only motion in all that dark. From his navel a single lotus has grown up through the water, and on the lotus sits Brahma, the maker, waiting for the world to begin again.
Everything is poised. The world has ended and not yet restarted. And the one who could set it going again is asleep.
The Sleeper on the Waters
Look closely at that sleep, because the text wants you to. Vishnu is not merely tired, and the sleep that holds him is not a thing that happened to him from outside. The sleep is Herself. It is the Goddess in her form as Yoga-nidra, the yogic slumber, settled over his eyes, folding the whole world into rest.
The last chapter promised exactly this. The power that binds the world and the power that frees it are one Goddess, and here she wears her binding face as sleep. The world has not been destroyed by an enemy. It has been laid down to rest by the very power that made it. Between two great days of creation, she is the night in between.