Everyone enjoys a sound sleep. It is really wonderful to be able to sleep deep and wake up refreshed.  It is a healthy feeling. However, not everyone can sleep deep and still, what’s more, not always! Psychologists classify different levels of sleep and they say that only in a certain level of sleep do we encounter dreams.  Of course there are dreamless states of sleep—beta sleep—wherein we become completely unconscious and wake up totally refreshed. Adi Sankara, Indian philosopher extraordinaire, classifies human awareness resorting to the Upanishads in this manner: jagrat (self-aware and conscious, the state of visva), swapna (dream state and half-aware, the state of taijasa), sushupti (deep sleep completely unconscious, the state of prajna). He also identifies one more deeper state of unconscious—turiya—the state of metaphysical being where the object consciousness and transcendental awareness become one. Being in prajna is in a state of deep sleep in Sankara’s view. And of course this is a natural necessity.

In common understanding sleep is certainly a shorter version of death. And generations have been fascinated by this phenomenon, of self-extinction for a brief period and revival of the same self refreshed! What will happen if one were not to wake up from sleep at all, or, worse still wake up after too long a time like Rip van Winkle? Our whole world would be topsy-turvy.  We would be dislodged from the world and would be forced to wander around like Hamlets unable to carry out any action, or worse still be like Aswathama, cursed forever to be alive and awake for an inhumanly long period.
 
I like to sleep, long and deep.  But have always suffered sleep disorders. Many a night I have tossed and turned in my bed unable to visit the sleepy world. I have scribbled in my old diaries many a poem relating to sleep:

As a teenager I used to enjoy reading and writing into the late hours of the night simply because that would be the only available time, and the rest of the day was all taken up by many other activities and involvements. However eventually I realized the true value of sleep and began going to bed at regular times and that too sufficiently early according to the western proverb: early to bed… This could not go on long. Soon enough the problems of sleep disorder started visiting me again and again.

As one grows older I guess one sleeps less and less. The life of a human being is so short and so unpredictable. As the poet says: a man may climb the stairs and fall down and die… And our hours of awareness and wakefulness are so brief and insignificant. Death of course may not be the end of everything, nevertheless the number of deaths one comes across as one grows up and older, naturally, becomes more alarmingly numerous. As one’s colleagues and close associates and friends and others pass one by, one begins to realize the seriousness of all this and it should at least make one aware of the brevity and uniqueness of one’s life.  How could one afford to waste away this grace of being self aware in so mundane an activity like sleep?  Aren’t we accorded this consciousness to be able to enter into a communication with all that are around us? And where is the time for us to know and sense, and be alive if we wither it all away in inaction and sleep? Are we doing the right thing by wasting our precious self-aware conscious hours that are given to us?

We assume that life means action and doing at the conscious surface level. What we do in our conscious lives is all that would be apparent to us and all that would make sense to us as our doing and thus constitute our meaningful being. We come to believe that the totality of all our actions would constitute the total meaning of our individual lives. Action in the conscious world of being is all that would mean anything. What we of course tend to forget is the large dimensions of our subconscious and unconscious being that remain submerged in the unaware dimension of turiya. Action that we often recognize at the outer level is of course at the surface level of our being. Perhaps in sleep we are able to come into contact with these larger dimensions of our inner being! It might be that sleep is like a recharging of our existential batteries.
 
Sleepy ways are strewn With flowers of diverse hue…

We need to be more and more self aware in our lives, no doubt. This is probably what Sankara meant when he went about calling for more jagrata—awareness.  We need to revitalize our self-aware conscious states of being by falling asleep periodically. All living things sleep and give their biological system some rest in order to recharge and revitalize their beings. The question nevertheless remains: are we the same persons who wake up after a good sleep? How do we know we do not disappear completely during the course of our sleep? Is death really another order of sleep? What happens to our self-hood when we are asleep? How do we wake up when someone calls us by our names while we are asleep?  These are quite complicated issues.
 
Our consciousness is like a torchlight moving over the surface of objects and things in the dark, illuminating them briefly while it passes over each. We see, sense, feel, smell and taste many things. Our inside self is constituted of all these varied sense experiences, it is a collective composite. When we sleep every sense is extinguished and yet when we wake up the sensations continue as of old and their felt experience is carried forward—the collective composite thus snowballs forth. Sleep does not actually extinguish our selfhood, albeit briefly, but on the other hand, it just lays our overactive mind to rest.

This periodical rest for the mind is as necessary as it is to the active body that constitutes our physical self. Perhaps the complicated issue here is that one cannot consciously fall asleep! Of course, the body’s biochemistry can be altered in any manner by the induction of certain drugs or even alcohol. Nevertheless the self cannot will itself to be laid to rest. one could kill oneself—physically terminate one’s self—but one cannot extinguish one’s self-consciousness, consciously. Once you are self-aware you are doomed to continue with that knowledge.  Sleep should come over us like a wave washing over the surface of the beach. Naturally, effortlessly.
 
Being at peace with all the world and the rest of being is beta sleep. As with everything else a healthy mind constitutes a healthy body, and healthy sleep constitutes healthy being. Disordered sleep causes tension within. Sometimes, however, even tension is necessary for leading the mind towards harmony and holistic being. Well, that’s another story altogether.