When we sleep, are we conscious?
Philosophy Curriculum #41: Some thoughts on the Upanishadic map of consciousness
Unless you have developed some seriously supernatural powers, you are conscious as you are reading this. Awake. On. Later this evening, as you catch your forty winks, you’ll be unconscious. Fast asleep. Off.
That’s how we see our states of consciousness, right? Awake and asleep. On and off.
But are we, and our consciousness, ever really off?
The “first recorded map of consciousness1” sits within the Upanishads - a text I’ve been reading over the last month as part of my self-study into philosophy. According to the Upanishads, we have more than just two states of consciousness. There are the ones we meet every day: being awake and dreaming. Then there are another two: a consciousness during deep dreamless sleep and an awareness that sits underneath the others. Today, Il’ll be talking about the deep dreamless sleep.
I could be exposing myself here but every night, before I drift off, I try to decide what I’m going to dream about. At the moment it’s the house renovation (the paint, the furniture, the flooring, which way the tiles should run). Other nights I put myself back inside a conversation I wish had gone differently and run it again with the words and tone I wish I’d used.
I’m not sure what I think I’m doing. Trying to get my overthinking to carry on into the one window where my brain is meant to be off duty, maybe. Or treating sleep as productive time, as if I could tick a few things off while I’m under.
The lucid ones, the dreams I know I'm in while they're happening, are the ones I enjoy most. That's a hint, really, that being asleep and being conscious aren't quite opposites - I'm fully aware, and fast asleep, at the same time.
But I don’t get that every night. Majority of my sleep is the deep, dreamless kind. Where I would typically consider myself to be properly “off”. Unconscious.
The Upanishads would challenge me here. They don’t think I’m “off” here at all. This deep state is, apparently, our third state of consciousness - and in it, something in us stays aware even when there’s nothing to be aware of.
I really struggled with this. How can deep sleep - something I’m not conscious of until I’m out of it - be a state of consciousness at all?
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The answer that grew out of this is that just because we don’t remember anything of our deep dreamless sleep doesn’t mean that we aren’t conscious during it.
