Is sleep simply regeneration time for busy animals, or does something more profound happen when we fall into that other consciousness? Mark Vernon digs deep for answers

“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” Thus spoke the psalmist, praising God for the gift of sleep. And it is a gift. Ask someone with chronic insomnia. The condition is at first unpleasant, then tortuous, and ultimately, quite literally maddening. We have a basic need for sleep.

Some folk can get by on six hours; I’m someone who feels jaded when robbed of less than eight. But whatever your optimum: live a life that routinely disallows that amount and you’ll soon feel it. New parents live with brain fog for a year maximum, if they’re lucky. The workaholic, with a backlit screen glowing by their side, grows accustomed to the buzzy sense of being permanently “on”; until the burnout overwhelms them and they crash – a kind of desperate attempt at self-healing.

But why do human beings need to fall unconscious for about a third of their lives? Why do we call a good life one that includes repeatedly losing control of all our faculties for an extended period of time? Put like that, sleep is an extraordinary conundrum.

The biological sciences attempt to provide answers. All animals sleep, so the thought is that there must be a creaturely purpose. The theories abound: when we sleep we grow; when we sleep we save energy; when we sleep we stay out of harm’s way; when we sleep we integrate the experiences of the day. Except that, there is no general agreement as to the reason for sleep which, in the world of science, means that sleep remains a deep mystery.

In philosophy, sleep is examined, too. A negative view metaphorically associates sleep with a lack of awareness or stupidity. Conversely, to wake up is to see life clearly, not be fooled, possess insight. Socrates, for example, was known not to have fallen asleep on at least one occasion and the overnighter enhanced his acumen. The incident comes at the end of the Symposium when, after a night’s drinking with friends, Plato reports that the partygoers nodded off, one by one. Only Socrates survived until dawn, at which point he rose from his couch and made for the agora. Another day, another opportunity to ask questions and annoy his compatriots.

Moreover, on that morning, he posed a particularly good question: is it possible to write a comedy that is also a tragedy? Which is a fancy way of asking whether life’s ups ultimately defeat life’s downs. Not sleeping, for Socrates, extended the penetration of his mind.

I have heard a similar claim made for those who are enlightened. Buddhist monks, for example, might spend the night meditating upright in boxes so that they can’t fall asleep. The theory is that liberated individuals attain a clarity of mind that needs no rest because they have become fully transparent to the wisdom of the world: a buddha has ceased to need to do mental work and, to that extent, has ceased to need sleep.

That said, other philosophers have regarded sleep favourably. Take Nietzsche, who recommended sleep in an ironic mode: love sleep as an escape from yourself, he suggested. “What can one do to rouse oneself when one is tired and has had enough of oneself? One person recommends the casino, another Christianity, a third electricity [he lived in the age of mesmerism]. The best thing, however, my melancholy friend, is plenty of sleep, real and metaphorical! Thus one will again awake to a new morning! The art in the wisdom of life lies in knowing how to fall asleep in either sense at the proper time.”

Other thinkers have been disturbed by the phenomenon of sleep. For modern philosophers like Descartes and John Locke, the existence of sleep is a profound challenge to their notions of identity. Roughly speaking, if to be is to think, or to be is to experience, then the massive temporal gap that opens up in our thinking and experiencing every 24 hours is very confusing. Do we wake up the same individual we were when we fell asleep? Locke concluded that there is no way of being sure that, during the night, we don’t become a different person.

For myself, I suspect that something unexpected does happen to us while we sleep. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger caught the issue well in his short book What Is Life? He notes that in a dream, for instance, we are only ever one of the characters – the one being chased, the one flying, the one drowning. That we experience the “dream-I” in this way is remarkable because all the other characters in the dream come from our minds, too, though we can only observe them, objectively. A dream is, therefore, very different from a novel because a novelist knows the inner thoughts of all the characters on the page, not just one.

Maybe, Schrödinger mused, this peculiarity tells us something about the nature of consciousness. The dream-I is unaware that there is a singular consciousness which generates everything that it perceives and everyone with whom it interacts and, moreover, that this creative consciousness is, in fact, its own. Perhaps, then, when we dream, we return to a state of awareness that is obscured by the bright light of our daytime ego-consciousness. There is a universal consciousness that sustains all beings, all things, Schrödinger concluded, analogous to our minds generating dreams.

We need to sleep, then, because during deep sleep, the struggles of life cease. We get a break from anxious self-concern; we find relief from existential isolation and return to an underlying unity. That would be why God gives his beloved sleep and suggests easing up on the bread of toil. Sleep is, in fact, heavenly.

This article appears in Idler #100.

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