Does Sleep Make You Atheist
Someone from a prior era, maybe John Derbyshire, once said sleep made him an atheist. The existential horror of just… shutting down completely
I have never felt that existential horror (though I have sometimes idly speculated that maybe spirits aren’t fully self-aware until embodied).
But there is a stage of sleep that makes my flesh creep. It’s when you wake up in the night and can’t sleep. You look at the clock. You then lie there wide awake for what seems like half an hour but when you look its only 10 minutes. You then toss and turn some more, again, it feels like half an hour. You look at the clock again, and two hours have passed. Somehow you have slipped in and out of consciousness without realizing it. And this does horrify me. It does not lead me to atheism, but it strikes some kind of existential fear in me. To be so powerless that your mind can disappear and you not even know it. Just you are there and then you are not.
E.C.
May 1, 2025
Unhelpful, but I have a new horror for you there: when you get a migraine so severe that you slip into unconsciousness. Time stretches out into a vast concatenation of endless misery, while at the same time slipping past far faster than you’d thought. You realize that you have spent the entire day in bed not sleeping, and yet you feel the weight of the pain you suffered while in such a state settle into your belly and deaden your limbs.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I hate migraines. And get them frequently. I’m not atheist yet, but shutting down completely while floating in vast oceans of pain is not how I prefer to spend my time.
G.
May 1, 2025
That “yet” made me laugh.
Sute
May 1, 2025
Occasionally I’m so tired that I can’t move my limbs while asleep but vaguely awake enough to know I want to roll over or something and I feel this immense burden of just moving my lead like arms or legs and it’s like I’m in hell.
The idea of closing your eyes and falling asleep is always interesting. Where do we go? We just trust that it’s normal and do it, but it’s pretty bizarre when you think about it.
It would be a fun sci fi story to have an alien race come to earth that never sleeps and is just absolutely abhorred by this idea of the entire planet shutting themselves down for 8-10 hrs every day.
E.C.
May 1, 2025
The reason I’m not an atheist yet, despite the problem of pain? God speaks most clearly when I’m dealing with severe pain. I wish it weren’t so, but it’s likely that I listen better when I’m hurting.
[]
May 2, 2025
That my consciousness has clearly lost its continuity when I slept but I so clearly continue to exist gives me a lot of hope, whatever experiences I have through this strange adventure a little soul sleep won’t hurt me.
Evenstar
May 2, 2025
Hmm. My experience has been very different. I love to sleep. Even during my worst bouts of depression, I was glad to fall asleep because I was never depressed in my sleep. Slipping in and out of consciousness is frustrating because I want to rest, not because I fear that lack of consciousness equals nonexistence.
Eric
May 5, 2025
Sute: There was an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where an occasional guest character, Q, was forced to abandon his god-like powers and live like a human on the Enterprise.
After he was settled on the ship, Captain Picard went to Q’s room for a visit, and Q told him about how he had been waiting for the captain for some time, but then fell into a state of unconsciousness that lasted for several hours. Picard then tells Q about sleep. Q is horrified and asks how humans can stand such a thing. Picard’s answer is that we get used to it, and sometimes even enjoy it.
IAW
May 10, 2025
OK, this is weird to me, because I never really slip out of consciousness, as far as I can tell. My sense of time gets distorted, but I basically dream every time I sleep, and my consciousness never really stops, as I just enter the dream-world and sometimes it gets confused with the real world (for a few seconds on either side of sleep) and I can’t always recall my dreams (though I always recall having them), but my consciousness never really “stops” – even asleep, I am aware of me as me.
G.
May 11, 2025
That’s what happens when I nap
IAW
May 11, 2025
Hmm. Maybe I just nap all night. I just figured it was one of those things where everyone is different (like some people can see crystal clear images in their heads, and some people can’t see them at all, and I see fuzzy, semi-surrealistic images), but maybe I have sleep issues.
G
May 12, 2025
Probably the former