The Meaning of Sleep

God bless Dr. Charlton.  If he did not exist, we would have to invent him (but would be unable to).

Our starting point should be that the basic inescapable features of life are meant and have a point and a meaning in the divine plan.  Things like breathing, eating, talking, sleep, and elimination.Dr. Charlton points to two aspects of sleep.

First, there is the simplicity of it.  You shut down and mostly blank out.  This part of sleep is childlike.  No one sleeps quite like an infant or a young child, and carrying one when they reach that nearly liquid state is one of the pleasures of life.

To my mind, the aspect of becoming like a little child is very important.  If we were conscious all the time, it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that consciousness and higher thought were purer and better.  The childishness, even the animality, of sleep, is part of the point.

Second, there are dreams and the free wandering of the mind.  Dr. Charlton associates this with the premortal existence, which complements an intuition I have long had that the purely spiritual state is dreamlike.

Where do we go when asleep? Well, when we sleep we return to the spirit state of our pre-mortal existence; so our conscious-self is no longer localised in a body. We go into the universal and universally-accessible spirit world – inner space (as it used to be conceptualised); an unbounded space within everyone; but not contained by them; so it is a single space into which each person is a ‘portal’. (e.g. The ancient Egyptian dwat, Jung’s collective unconscious – same thing.)

By these sleep experiences everyone has a rich and various life; and sleep life is both complementary to and deepening of awake life. In sleep we can access our own experience, and universal experiences – this mortal life and the Heavenly world of pre-mortal life – also the persons of God, angels, the dead… (Some of whom are misguided and some of whom are evil.)

Thus sleep enables deepening and contextualising of our experiences: sleep makes us wiser persons (if we allow it).

Progress involves adding to and refining what you already have, not leaving it behind.  The full man is the man with full faculties and character, yes–but who embraces all that he has been before, and brings it and his later developments into concert.

P.S.  No wisdom about sleep would be complete without understanding the rhythm of it.  Sleep and wake and sleep again.