The Philosophy of Sleep

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A good night’s rest, slumberland, downtime, out cold, dead-to-the-world - it’s the opposite of everything that philosophy stands for! Philosophy is about human consciousness, autonomy, the will, and Reason - none of which are operative during sleep. Sleep is darkness, nothingness - a void.  And yet we spend a third of our lives in sleep.  We often yearn for it and regret its loss.  We can very definitely feel the effects  of sleep loss: brain fog,  flu-like fatigue, and extreme irritability.  Eventually, with enough consecutive sleep loss we start to hallucinate, and after that it gets unimaginably worse.


Our sleep/wake cycle directly connects us to the Earth’s rotation and its relation to the Sun.  This we share with all other life forms, including the ocean’s vast population of microscopic plankton that, since the dawn of time, collectively rises to the surface every morning and sinks to the depths every night.  Sleep connects us to our deep past and our deep nature - but what is that nature?  


Consider that we cannot “will” ourselves to sleep.  Yes, we can prepare ourselves for sleep by finishing our nighttime routine and getting into bed; but in order to go asleep you have to fall asleep - i.e., let go of your will and autonomy - falling asleep happens to us, as it were.  Nor is waking up something wholly intentional;  yes, we can set the alarm and have it wake us up out of a dead sleep, but, even without the alarm, we find ourselves waking up at some point without really understanding what made it happen. This whole period of sleep is a mystery to us for a very good reason - we simply lack awareness of what’s going on when we are sleeping.


  Our common sense tells us that sleep is restorative.  We wake up after a good night’s sleep refreshed and ready to go.    But what is rest and restoration?  On closer examination it is not apparent what rest consists of, other than the total relaxation of most of our skeletal muscles, reduced activity in our digestive system, but the continuation in heart and breathing activity, as well as the activity of the autonomic nervous system, whatever that is!  It’s difficult to come up with anything more than a very vague idea about what rest is and why we need it in such great quantities.


What we do know about sleep barely scratches the surface.  We know that sleep is necessary for physical growth in infancy and childhood, which is a big reason babies sleep so much.  We know that lack of sleep can make us more susceptible to colds, so that suggests that sleep is necessary for healthy immune systems.  We know that chronic sleep loss can be bad for our brains.  Some anecdotal evidence:  Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan claimed they only needed about four hours of sleep a night, and both ended up with alzheimers in their late seventies.   We know that sleep is necessary in order to retain long term memories.  We know that sleep is necessary for the healing process, (again, the immune system.) Understandably  heart attack victims do better if they get lots of sleep, whereas those who don’t are more likely to see further episodes of heart damage.


It seems to me that some of the main subjects of focus in philosophy:  consciousness, autonomy, and the will, are not just unneeded in sleep’s functioning, they manifestly get in the way.  The body knows best, since for at least one third of our existence it overrides consciousness to get what it wants.  As Sigmund Freud realized, consciousness is not the be all and end all.  OK, but, speaking of Freud, isn’t dreaming, which goes on during every night's sleep, a form of consciousness? Philosophers are perennially hopeful that they can bring the conversation back to the problem of consciousness. With that in mind, please ensure you get a good night’s rest!

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