The Nature of Sleep

Exploring That Most Familiar, Yet Most Mysterious Aspect of Our Lives

Your body and your mind have a specific nature; they want to work in a certain way, follow a certain path. Our job is to discover that path and do our best to stay on it. Sleep is as fundamental to this as any part of life. So what we want to do now is take a close look at the inner workings of sleep in order to gain a deeper understanding of it. We want to learn its ways so that we can stay as faithful as possible to its nature.

A Mystery

Imagine you had this friend; a really good friend, someone you’ve known all your life. You trust this person implicitly. You know almost everything there is to know about them. Except… This friend has a very strange habit of disappearing for hours at a time with no explanation. It happens every day. You have no idea where they go or what they’re doing during that time. If you were to ask them, they would just smile and give an evasive non-answer. Politeness prevents you from prying too much — and you know there’s absolutely nothing sinister going on here — but you really wish you could get to the bottom of this mysterious aspect of their life.

Well, the friend here is your own self. Every day tor eight hours or so we disappear into sleep, letting go of our outer self and dissolving into our inner self. Nothing in life is more familiar to us, nothing feels safer; and yet when we wake up in the morning, we know not just where we’ve been. When we drift off at night we exit the firm ground of consciousness and enter…what?

Sleep, of course. But what exactly is sleep? Not being awake? There must be more to it than that.

What is Sleep?

A quick trip over to Wikipedia reveals that sleep is in fact:

…a naturally recurring state of relatively suspended sensory and motor activity, characterized by total or partial unconsciousness, and the inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles. It is distinguished from quiet wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, and it is more easily reversible than hibernation or coma.

Hmmm. If that just sounds to you like an elaborate way of saying “not being awake”, we agree. This is one of those definitions that chases its own tail. If you had asked, “What is a Higgs boson?” or “What is tensor calculus?” you could have gotten a straight answer.

But sleep, it turns out, is a little harder to pin down than we might have thought. Defining exactly what it is, understanding its physiological purpose, and describing its characteristics is deceptively challenging.

The serious study of sleep is a relatively young science, still filled with speculation and hypothesis. It encompasses everything from biology to psychology — and at its outer edges are the realms of philosophy and even spirituality.

This is an endlessly fascinating subject and so crucially relevant to our lives! By deepening our understanding of the nature of sleep and learning to trust in its goodness, we can harness its considerable power and put ourselves in the driver’s seat.

So let’s take a look at what we do know about sleep and ponder some of the unanswered questions. We’re going to do a little innocent snooping on our good friend and try to see what they’ve been up to all this time…