The Vishnu Purana closes its final book with a systematic ladder of dissolutions, and the ladder is a map of the doctrine's meanings. Lowest is nitya pralaya, the constant dissolution: the ordinary, uninterrupted perishing of beings, every death a small instance of the cosmic process. Next is the naimittika pralaya, the occasional dissolution at the end of each day of Brahma, when the three worlds are burned and drowned and the creator sleeps. Above it stands prakritika pralaya, the elemental dissolution at the end of Brahma's hundred-year life, when not merely the worlds but nature itself, the elements, the senses, the categories, telescopes back into unmanifest prakriti, each element swallowed by the subtler one that produced it until nothing differentiated remains.
Highest, and characteristically, the text places atyantika pralaya, the absolute dissolution, which is not a cosmic event at all but an individual one: the final liberation of a soul that, through knowledge, dissolves its connection to matter forever and does not return in any future creation. The ascent from funeral to cosmology to metaphysics to moksha is deliberate. Dissolution, the scheme says, is one process appearing at every scale, and the wise respond not by dreading the large versions but by accomplishing the highest one, making of their own release a dissolution that no dawn of Brahma will reverse.