The Secret Message of Sleep

Sleep, falling asleep, seems to me a strange phenomenon.   We are awake all day, consciously engaged with the world, and then something happens.  The consciousness that I am, my experience of reality, becomes fuzzy and lethargic. Tired, it withdraws from the external world and falls asleep. At first, nothing, no more consciousness; just like death, (at least according to the materialist credo).  So, in the world of sleep, we experience the nonbeing that presumably is death.  

But that’s not the secret of sleep.  Rather, the secret is that out of the nothingness of dreamless sleep emerges the conscious world of dreams—the vestibule of the afterlife?  

We are layered creatures and range across different forms of conscious reality.  Begin with common waking consciousness. But by day’s end we get tired and need to sleep. So we enter  another interesting layer of consciousness, hypnagogia, literally, falling asleep.  This can be missed, but if you don’t fall asleep easily, you may slip into the hypnagogic state. You’re still awake but also coasting in dream space. (Surrealists love this layer of our mental life.)  In the next layer, past hypnagogia, you enter the full dream world. I have a question.  Are sleep and dream a metaphor of life after death? 

We do spend almost a third of our life cycling back and forth in our sleep and dream life.  What’s the point of our dream life anyway? From one angle, dream space looks like the connecting link between our waking space and our possible afterlife space. Is our nightly dream life signaling us from the great beyond?  Prepping us for the big transition?

As for an afterlife, there is a huge, sprawling literature, unfortunately ignored by most academics and journalists.  Evidence for an after world is vast and varied (see my book, Experiencing the Next World Now);  nowadays the leading contender for survival proof is the near-death experience.  People who have near-death experiences appear in case after case on YouTube; they tell their own stories, all quite unique while certain themes reveal a definite structure to the experience. Evidence aside, just falling asleep and dreaming seem to be telling us something about death and the afterlife—and that may be the secret message of our sleep and dream life.