Unfortunately some of us have insomnia so it’s not universally as involuntary as you might think. Also the sleeping itself isn’t a skill, but promoting sleep through sleep hygiene I’d say requires some acquired habits and choices. But I get your general point.
Thank you for your comment, I really appreciate it. Funnily enough, insomnia partly inspired the essay. I would argue that if sleep were truly volitional, insomniacs could simply choose it. The fact that we can’t summon it or refuse is the kind of limit I’m gesturing at. Agreed on hygiene though, while I don’t think we are conscious during sleep itself, we can at least set the stage beforehand.
Sleep has always been a topic I had an interesting relationship with, and this article makes me acknowledge that while also having a nice laugh at myself. Very cool!
Reminds me of Beggers in Spain where the sleepless race surpasses us because they have all that extra time. Meanwhile, since having a kid I need like 10 hours.
This sentence is a good summary. "In this sense, sleep is the daily rehearsal of a fact we otherwise deny at the cost of enormous energy: that surrendering to something beyond our control is not a failure of the self, but a condition for having one." We would lead a far better life if we learned to trust "Life itself"—which is what we are, and which is eternal. We would then enjoy a significantly higher quality of life than we do in our pursuit of recognition and fitness. https://independent.academia.edu/ManfredReichelt
I have often found myself laboring over the thought of having to sleep (in the late hours of the night when most other people have done so without the constraint of philosophical contemplating that has befallen me) out of spite of the reality that I have to secede a third of my day to something I barely even feel.
There is a real point to be made in this article, and I think you do it very well. It would be unfair of me to say that the only thing I wanted more of out of this article was for it merely to be longer and with more philosophizing; you're a law student with Substack as your outlet to write about the very topic you studied about for years, and you have grasped me here with your writing for the first time.
I think a major takeaway from this article for me is that no matter the passage of time or how much we try to contort and play with the idea, it is still and will likely always be hard for me to accept that I am "only human" as you write. It sounds absurd, I know, but there are many others out there who struggle with the same thing. Do I want to be a sleepless machine? No. But do I want to somehow surpass the barriers set by my biological clock in order to live more of my life? Somehow, yes. Alas, as a teacher I really cannot afford to play with time and energy as I know it will round back to kick me in the behind one way or another.
All of this is to say that your article certainly did not put me to sleep! ;)
Your thought that sleep is not merely a limit on the self, but part of what makes a self possible, stayed with me.
It raises a deeper question: if the self is partly formed by limits it did not choose, how can it judge which limits sustain its agency—and which diminish it?
This is such a good question, and I don’t think I have a clean answer. My instinct is that the self can’t judge from some limit-free vantage point; the judging is always done from inside the constraints. Which maybe means the best we can do is ask which limits we’d endorse on reflection, rather than which we’d choose from scratch. Thank you for reading so carefully.
Thank you, Grace. The distinction between choosing from scratch and endorsing on reflection clarifies the problem beautifully.
It also leaves me wondering whether reflection alone is enough when the limits being judged may shape what we are able to endorse. Perhaps we also need encounters with other lives and consequences that reveal what our own frame cannot.
First, pretty large assumption on your definition of consciousness and in sleep “you” are without it. Likely, you are unconscious of 99% (yes, making that up, its probably more) of the things that you think you are conscious of, while you are awake, if you can accurately call it that. And, just because of some collective dellusion that we agree to participate in doesnt change the psychological reality. Unfortunately, i have to go and no time for a second and third..
Fair pushback! You’re right that waking ‘consciousness’ is doing a lot of unexamined work in the piece. Most of what runs us is beneath awareness during the day too. Though I’d say that makes sleep stranger, not less strange, because it’s the one time even the 1% goes dark. I also think that sleep is distinguishable from the other unconscious machinery such as digestion or breathing because these run quietly underneath the self while the authoring goes on. Sleep, by contrast, suspends the self entirely so it feels like a bigger interruption of our agency to me. Thanks again for your comment.
Stranger is good. If it feels ordinary, you miss the point. Myself, I don’t believe in unconsciousness—merely gaps in consciousness. It “goes dark” as a gap, not an absence. Perhaps when asleep we know all sorts of things we cannot convert to what passes for waking knowledge. Maybe it is the backstage for the actor in the performance we call waking life.
Grace has an incredible sense of humor. While the perspective is clearly philosophical, sleep is one of the most consequential activities many humans get to undertake.
Thank you for your comment! My thought was that dreaming is a complicated territory that felt beyond the scope of this piece, and, to be honest, I don’t yet have a clear view on questions like how much agency is involved. But I’d love to read more about this, thanks for raising it!
If you would like an answer to your 6-year-old self's question without being a "STEM person," I highly recommend the beautifully written book "Why We Sleep" by Berkeley professor Matthew Walker. It comprehensively answers the question in a way that is accessible to the general public. The book is fascinating and completely transformed my view on and relationship with sleep. I highly recommend it as a former sleep hater in my childhood/teenage years and sleep skeptic in adulthood.
Something I learned from the book is that it is not just human beings that need sleep. Every living creature we know of sleeps in some form. Even single-celled organisms undergo metabolic cycles of rest and activity driven by adenosine - the biological precursor to sleep in multi-celled organisms. So I would argue that to sleep isn't just part of what makes us human, as you say in your nicely written essay. It's part of what makes us alive.
Furthermore, there is a massive obvious disadvantage to being asleep in nature - being in a state where we lack awareness of our surroundings, the ability to respond to stimuli, and (in the case of REM sleep) proper muscle control makes us incredibly vulnerable. What that tells us is that the biological advantages to gain from being in this state must be enormous for sleep to be so ubiquitous in living beings. Prof. Walker explains many of those advantages, discovered through research in sleep labs, in his book.
Very bold of you to think the unconscious is not a place in and of it self. We don't disappear when we sleep, sleep is like diving into the abyssal zone. And that's where it's value lies. Everything we can touch, smell, see and hear is less than one billionth of reality. We have the capacity to access what is effectively a shadow realm and alternate universe in our own bodies. The unconscious brain is awake and alive, even on a vegetative state. There's very little that's passive about it.
Unfortunately some of us have insomnia so it’s not universally as involuntary as you might think. Also the sleeping itself isn’t a skill, but promoting sleep through sleep hygiene I’d say requires some acquired habits and choices. But I get your general point.
Thank you for your comment, I really appreciate it. Funnily enough, insomnia partly inspired the essay. I would argue that if sleep were truly volitional, insomniacs could simply choose it. The fact that we can’t summon it or refuse is the kind of limit I’m gesturing at. Agreed on hygiene though, while I don’t think we are conscious during sleep itself, we can at least set the stage beforehand.
I agree. That’s a good point. Insomnia definitely doesn’t make sleep more voluntary.
Sleep has always been a topic I had an interesting relationship with, and this article makes me acknowledge that while also having a nice laugh at myself. Very cool!
Reminds me of Beggers in Spain where the sleepless race surpasses us because they have all that extra time. Meanwhile, since having a kid I need like 10 hours.
This sentence is a good summary. "In this sense, sleep is the daily rehearsal of a fact we otherwise deny at the cost of enormous energy: that surrendering to something beyond our control is not a failure of the self, but a condition for having one." We would lead a far better life if we learned to trust "Life itself"—which is what we are, and which is eternal. We would then enjoy a significantly higher quality of life than we do in our pursuit of recognition and fitness. https://independent.academia.edu/ManfredReichelt
I have often found myself laboring over the thought of having to sleep (in the late hours of the night when most other people have done so without the constraint of philosophical contemplating that has befallen me) out of spite of the reality that I have to secede a third of my day to something I barely even feel.
There is a real point to be made in this article, and I think you do it very well. It would be unfair of me to say that the only thing I wanted more of out of this article was for it merely to be longer and with more philosophizing; you're a law student with Substack as your outlet to write about the very topic you studied about for years, and you have grasped me here with your writing for the first time.
I think a major takeaway from this article for me is that no matter the passage of time or how much we try to contort and play with the idea, it is still and will likely always be hard for me to accept that I am "only human" as you write. It sounds absurd, I know, but there are many others out there who struggle with the same thing. Do I want to be a sleepless machine? No. But do I want to somehow surpass the barriers set by my biological clock in order to live more of my life? Somehow, yes. Alas, as a teacher I really cannot afford to play with time and energy as I know it will round back to kick me in the behind one way or another.
All of this is to say that your article certainly did not put me to sleep! ;)
“that surrendering to something we cannot control is not a failure of the self but a condition of having one.”
oops you dropped something!
Your thought that sleep is not merely a limit on the self, but part of what makes a self possible, stayed with me.
It raises a deeper question: if the self is partly formed by limits it did not choose, how can it judge which limits sustain its agency—and which diminish it?
This is such a good question, and I don’t think I have a clean answer. My instinct is that the self can’t judge from some limit-free vantage point; the judging is always done from inside the constraints. Which maybe means the best we can do is ask which limits we’d endorse on reflection, rather than which we’d choose from scratch. Thank you for reading so carefully.
Thank you, Grace. The distinction between choosing from scratch and endorsing on reflection clarifies the problem beautifully.
It also leaves me wondering whether reflection alone is enough when the limits being judged may shape what we are able to endorse. Perhaps we also need encounters with other lives and consequences that reveal what our own frame cannot.
First, pretty large assumption on your definition of consciousness and in sleep “you” are without it. Likely, you are unconscious of 99% (yes, making that up, its probably more) of the things that you think you are conscious of, while you are awake, if you can accurately call it that. And, just because of some collective dellusion that we agree to participate in doesnt change the psychological reality. Unfortunately, i have to go and no time for a second and third..
Fair pushback! You’re right that waking ‘consciousness’ is doing a lot of unexamined work in the piece. Most of what runs us is beneath awareness during the day too. Though I’d say that makes sleep stranger, not less strange, because it’s the one time even the 1% goes dark. I also think that sleep is distinguishable from the other unconscious machinery such as digestion or breathing because these run quietly underneath the self while the authoring goes on. Sleep, by contrast, suspends the self entirely so it feels like a bigger interruption of our agency to me. Thanks again for your comment.
Stranger is good. If it feels ordinary, you miss the point. Myself, I don’t believe in unconsciousness—merely gaps in consciousness. It “goes dark” as a gap, not an absence. Perhaps when asleep we know all sorts of things we cannot convert to what passes for waking knowledge. Maybe it is the backstage for the actor in the performance we call waking life.
Grace has an incredible sense of humor. While the perspective is clearly philosophical, sleep is one of the most consequential activities many humans get to undertake.
This is why I love Substack! Such an interesting take on sleep. I loved reading it
But what of Dreams?
Thank you for your comment! My thought was that dreaming is a complicated territory that felt beyond the scope of this piece, and, to be honest, I don’t yet have a clear view on questions like how much agency is involved. But I’d love to read more about this, thanks for raising it!
If you would like an answer to your 6-year-old self's question without being a "STEM person," I highly recommend the beautifully written book "Why We Sleep" by Berkeley professor Matthew Walker. It comprehensively answers the question in a way that is accessible to the general public. The book is fascinating and completely transformed my view on and relationship with sleep. I highly recommend it as a former sleep hater in my childhood/teenage years and sleep skeptic in adulthood.
Something I learned from the book is that it is not just human beings that need sleep. Every living creature we know of sleeps in some form. Even single-celled organisms undergo metabolic cycles of rest and activity driven by adenosine - the biological precursor to sleep in multi-celled organisms. So I would argue that to sleep isn't just part of what makes us human, as you say in your nicely written essay. It's part of what makes us alive.
Furthermore, there is a massive obvious disadvantage to being asleep in nature - being in a state where we lack awareness of our surroundings, the ability to respond to stimuli, and (in the case of REM sleep) proper muscle control makes us incredibly vulnerable. What that tells us is that the biological advantages to gain from being in this state must be enormous for sleep to be so ubiquitous in living beings. Prof. Walker explains many of those advantages, discovered through research in sleep labs, in his book.
I snooze, therefore I am.
Very bold of you to think the unconscious is not a place in and of it self. We don't disappear when we sleep, sleep is like diving into the abyssal zone. And that's where it's value lies. Everything we can touch, smell, see and hear is less than one billionth of reality. We have the capacity to access what is effectively a shadow realm and alternate universe in our own bodies. The unconscious brain is awake and alive, even on a vegetative state. There's very little that's passive about it.