Where Do We Go In Sleep?

Does sleep prove materialism? If our consciousness is the capacity of an immaterial agency, and we are that agency, why do we go away when the brain has to rest?

Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.

Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.

That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.

My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.

How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.

· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.

· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.

· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.

Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.

Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.

The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.

I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.