Sleep is Death
An essay. About four paperback pages.
Bury a friend. This essay was published on February 7, 2024.
Some portion of sleep is phenomenologically conscious (the dreaming part). Most of sleep decidedly isn’t. The awful importance of getting enough sleep has been deliciously, sanctimoniously pedantized by pedigreed professional podcast guests and bedside booksellers to the point that we all know by now, don’t we, just how fucking important it is to sleep. Seven hours minimum, is it?
The cost-benefit analysis is made to seem obvious. Look upon the benefits in their fearful multiplicity: haven’t you read the studies? Haven’t you read the studies?
And at what cost?
For a moment, ignore the richness of your experience. Forget about colors, sounds, feelings, and all the other stuff we usually like to quibble about when discussing consciousness. Instead, observe whether you are conscious at all, in binary—are you conscious? You are? Good.
If you are a person reading this, and not an LLM or web browser or spindly search-engine crawler, then it’s obvious that yes is the only possible truthful answer. By construction (that is, in a sense that’s baked into our language), one must be conscious in the first place to have the experience of reading and responding to the question, because to have any experience at all is what it means to be conscious.
For some of us, the moment immediately before our death will be qualitatively unusual among all the moments of our lives. It will involve strange mixtures of new physical and psychological sensations as our bodies finally malfunction in a way that is catastrophic and irreversible. But for many, or maybe most of us, that moment will be unremarkable. We will be breathing a bit, and thinking a bit, and feeling a bit of the aches and pains that we’ve always felt in that moment before the electrical goings-on in our brains quietly click off. Disregarding the circumstantial fact that, for the first time, another moment simply will not arrive, the moment preceding death will be just another moment of experience, arbitrarily placed along a neat timeline of moments right at the very end of the row. In that last moment, the answer to the question Are you conscious? will be, as always, Yes.
What distinguishes what comes next, in part, is that it is nothing at all. Death is null consciousness, the absence of any experience, and therefore the absence of existence for the observer in question. But death, as we use the word, requires more. In addition to a fact about the present, it requires a fact about the future: that is, that there will be no existence again. If as a matter of fact there will be new conscious experience for an observer at some point B in the future, then we do not give the observer’s nonexistence in this moment A the label death.
Except—sometimes we do. Sometimes we use the word death to describe present nonexistence even if we presuppose that new consciousness will follow in the future, as long as it is distant enough in time.
How distant? It’s up to you. Notice how the length of unexperienced time presupposed to elapse between periods of consciousness earns new labels as it stretches arbitrarily longer:
A fighter takes a big hit. Electrical activity in her brain seizes for a half-second, and she stumbles; the crowd gasps; then, her heart pumps fresh blood, her lungs move new air, and her brain reboots; she is conscious again, and she raises her fists. She blacked out for a moment. No one says that she died.
Something goes awry in the operating room. The patient’s heartbeat flatlines, her lungs go still, and the doctor calls for paddles; a minute passes; then, the patient gasps, her lungs inflate, and the monitor resumes its beeping. Later, the doctor tells the patient she was dead on the operating table for 60 seconds. For the rest of her life, the patient repeats this phrasing to anyone who will listen, eliciting clutched pearls, rolled eyes, and tired disagreements about what it means to be dead. She was clinically dead, maybe.
A happy nonagenarian breathes her last in the company of her prosperous family; she is laid in the ground. Her brood is devoutly Christian, and they all believe, as deeply as they believe anything, that their loved one will be raised into life—in the most literal sense—any day now, as soon as the Lord returns. Yet, they all agree, she is indeed dead for the time being.
A happy novemillenarian breathes her last in the company of her prosperous family; she is laid in the stasis chamber. Her house is noble and enfranchised by the Galactic Crown, and they all know for a fact that within a few centuries, they will be visited by the royal medical corps to oversee the molecular rejuvenation of their beloved matriarch. Some of the elders refer to her as dead for the time being, but the younger generations are unfamiliar with the term.
It’s a word game. What we call a period of unconsciousness is subjective, arbitrarily dependent on our assumptions at the time about whether and how long it will last. And anyway, at any moment, what will come next can’t be known with any certainty. Defining each moment on its own terms, then: a moment is either a conscious one, or it isn’t.
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?