Asleep and Awake

Asleep and Awake

Listen, do you want to know a secret? The government has been withholding it from us. When we are asleep, we are awake, and when we are awake, we are asleep. We have been bamboozled into thinking that in sleep we are not awake and when awake not asleep. Sheer propaganda and lazy ordinary language (ordinary language propaganda). The best way to describe our mental state when in the condition we call “sleep” is that we are partially asleep and partially awake (very awake actually); and similarly, for being awake (we are partially asleep). This is not hard to demonstrate and requires no sleep science or fanciful hypotheses; it is common knowledge. We are always both asleep and awake. The OED defines “sleep” thus: “a regularly occurring condition of body and mind in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended”. This definition leaves a lot to be desired: people don’t always have the luxury of sleeping regularly, the nervous system is not inactive in sleep, the eyes are not invariably closed (you might not even have eyelids), the postural muscles are no more relaxed than they are when lying down awake, and what does it mean to say that consciousness is “practically suspended”? Clearly, the editors are having trouble defining the word (and the state itself). The basic idea is that the sleeping person (or animal) is (largely) unaware of his surroundings: he is not awake to his immediate environment. He is not tuned into what is going on around him, not conscious of it, oblivious to it. His mind is blank relative to his environment; his senses are cut from their usual perceptual function. He is selectively “blind”.

But let’s notice two things about this state of oblivion: it is not complete, and the sleeper is normally conscious of other things. Outside stimuli are still getting in to some degree, as experiments have shown; and, of course, he is often dreaming. He is quite well aware of his dreams—they are occurring in his sleeping consciousness. In dreaming we are aware of our dream objects—the intentional objects of our dreams (people and things). We are awake to these. We are not detached from our dreams; we know about them perfectly well, as our subsequent memory shows. We are not awake (much) to our environment, but we are awake to our dream world. We are not perceptually awake, but we are introspectively awake. Our perceptual consciousness is blank, but our dream consciousness is brimming with content—just as our day-dreaming consciousness is. We are not asleep relative to this, i.e., unresponsive to it, inactive with respect to it. Psychologically, we are very much awake: aware, conscious, affected, emotionally moved. We are not in an unconscious coma. Our nervous system is firing on all cylinders. Thus, we are partially awake during sleep (unless sleeping dreamlessly).

And there is a further point: we are also aware of the condition of our body—our posture, temperature, the state of our bladder, etc. We are awake where they are concerned. To be asleep is really best understood as being unaware perceptually (though even this is not total). Our senses are asleep, but not the rest of us. But we lazily describe this as if the whole conscious mind has shut down, which is far from the truth. Our normal concept of sleep disguises the psychological facts from us. Ordinary language misleads us. It was never designed to be pedantically correct psychologically. It isn’t meant to be scientific psychology. We can imagine speakers who say things like, “I was wide awake all night, dreaming of my mother-in-law”.  Might it not also turn out that our so-called dreams are really reality, so we never had them while asleep? It is epistemically possible that you are really awake when you think you are asleep dreaming. Qualitatively, dreams are like waking experience. The OED gives the phrase “awake to” the definition “aware of”, and we are certainly aware of our dreams (not to mention the state of our bladder). In short, you are awake when you are asleep—awake to.

The next claim is less obvious: that we are asleep when awake. But the reasoning is much the same: we are unaware of certain things that we are aware of during sleep. Here it is convenient to invoke Freud, at least as a thought experiment: in Freud’s psychology we are closed off in waking life to our unconscious, but we are aware of it in dreams—for example, you might dream of having sex with your mother. Suppose there exists some sorry species that actually has a mind as Freud described our mind: they dream at night of acting on their repressed sexual desires, but during waking hours no such content enters their heads. Then they are not aware of (awake to) the facts of their own mind, as revealed in their dreams; they are asleep relative to those facts. They are unconscious of their inner (psychological) environment when awake. They are awake to it at night, but not awake to it during the day—it’s as if they are asleep where that is concerned. They are in a detached sleep-like state when it comes to their unconscious desires. They have no consciousness of these while awake. They know them by night, but not in the light of day. Sometimes people are described as sleep-walking through life, meaning that they are oblivious to obvious facts, closed off to reality. It’s as they are asleep cognitively. The question then becomes whether we partake of any of this: are we at least somewhat Freudian? I think this is not an unreasonable conjecture: our dreams are tuned into facts about ourselves that never reach the surface in our waking life, except perhaps in a crisis situation. We gleefully go through life thinking we are decent intelligent human beings, say, while all along we are stupid bastards. We are asleep relative to the truth about ourselves, while awake relative to other things—unaware, incognizant. We are in a state like that of not seeing or hearing what is going on around us when asleep. The same natural psychological kind occurs in both cases.

We need a word for what we do typically at night when we close our eyes and don’t want to be disturbed, and we call that “sleep”. We also need a word that signifies that we are up and about and ready to face the day, and we call this being “awake”. We then think these are mutually exclusive, so it sounds funny to speak of sleeping wakefulness and waking sleep. But the psychological facts underlying these phases of human (and animal) existence are more complex than the simple binary distinction recognizes; the two states are more intertwined than we suppose. The fact is that we are in both states nearly all the time—blind to this but not to that, awake to this but not to that. A sleeping man might be extremely awake to certain things, and a waking man might be fast asleep with respect to his own self. Your dreaming life may be more awake than your waking life, and your waking life may be sleepier than your dreaming life, strange as it sounds. So much for the ordinary language of sleep and wakefulness.[1]

[1] Is it a matter of conversational implicature? If I say of a sleeping man “He is awake”, do I speak the literal truth, though the implicature that he is in perceptual touch with his surroundings is clearly false? If so, that would be a striking example of Grice’s invaluable distinction. Try it with “He is conscious” said of a sleeping (but dreaming) man; surely that statement is quite true, given that dreaming is a state of consciousness—implicatures notwithstanding. Is sleep, in reality, one kind of wakefulness and wakefulness one kind of sleep, though we don’t talk that way for implicature reasons? The human mind is asleep-awake all the time.