Why Aren’t We Afraid to Go to Sleep?

Some people, of course, are afraid of going to sleep, and for good reason: sufferers from sleep terrors, nightmares, sleep walking, apnea, and other maladies of sleep. Then there is the aversion to bedtime of small and not so small children. Maybe some of this is fear of sleep; more is probably because being awake is more fun. Eventually, it is outgrown. In any event, I am not addressing these groups. I also exclude from the “We” people who never remember their dreams.

My question is why those of us who are beyond childhood, not subject to sleep maladies, and remember some of our dreams are so blasé about going to sleep, indeed often positively relishing the prospect.

Why I find this surprising is because my thinking when I dream is so very bad. In fact, my whole mental/emotional complex is a mess. I am often stupid, ignorant, disoriented, and even, I fear, sometimes psychotic. The most out-of-joint absurdities I accept without hesitation. My reasoning capacity, despite all the courses in logic I took and taught, is sometimes bumblingly passable, but more often close to nil.

For example, just the other night I dreamt I was a member of some group or other. Maybe it was a law firm, a political party, a faculty committee, an HOA. Who knows?  I apparently didn’t think I needed to even though I was assigned the task of interrogating another member to determine if said member was disloyal, perhaps even an enemy agent. How could I possibly have identified an enemy, or known what questions to ask to that end, without any inkling of the nature or purposes of my group? Nonetheless I, in the dream, commenced my interrogation. What didn’t strike me as at all remarkable was that whomever I was interrogating was, or at least appeared as, a breakfast cereal box mostly green in color.

Perhaps you are never quite this impaired when you dream, but I doubt if you would so trust your mental acuity while dreaming as to step under its influence outside your waking life front door. If I thought that I would have, when out in the real world, so much as a ten minute such episode, I would never leave my room.

Why then do I, and do you, ever willingly go to sleep when we are so likely to find ourselves in dream scenarios in which we are distressingly impaired?

One possibility is that we know while dreaming that we are dreaming and so that none of what is going on really counts. We can get upset, anxious, angry, or fearful in dreams, but with rare exceptions we are not nearly as upset, anxious, angry or fearful as were we in the situation of the dream in real life. It does not occur to me when dreaming that I could face mockery for attempting to interrogate a cereal box or criticism for not doing it very well. Is it because I know it is not real life.

No, not, at least in the normal way, know things. This is shown by the “lucid dreaming” data. Being aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is to dream “lucidly.” It is pretty rare. Less than a percent of my dreams are lucid, and informal polling of my classes suggests that most people dream lucidly even less frequently or not at all. So, it cannot be that we are not afraid to dream because we are, when dreaming, consciously aware that we are dreaming and so that real-world people will not hold our dream conduct against us (unless, perhaps, we, ourselves, report it).

Though usually unaware when dreaming that we are dreaming, yet we know perfectly well when we are awake that going to sleep and dreaming is not likely to be dangerous or harmful. We remember some fun and happy dreams, but also some fear, anxiety, and confusion. By and large, however, the bad dreams were not so bad or not so frequent as to deter going to sleep. Except in special circumstances, we are not going to be thought less well of because of our dream contents. So, we know by experience that going to sleep is not something to be feared. This is part of the explanation of why we are not afraid to go to sleep, but we can go deeper.

Suppose that a researcher who proposes to use means psychotropic, hypnotic, electro-neuro-stimulative, or some combination thereof to induce in you into an equivalent of the mental/emotional impairment you might encounter when dreaming. You will be alone in a sealed room. No one, not even the investigator, will see you. There will be some instrumentation in the room, but the data it collects will be anonymized across subjects, and the research is only into some details of the mapping of nerve excitation. No one will ever know anything about the thoughts or conduct of the subjects, individually or collectively. There is no possibility of anyone ever thinking the less of you for those thoughts or conduct. That includes yourself, as you will be given an effective amnesia drug to blot out your memory of the session.

The researcher emphasizes, however, that you will be awake, as awake as ever you are, while the two-hour long experiment is in progress. You will experience your impairment just as you would in your day-to-day life, except that you will know that you are not out in public.

I, for one, wouldn’t do it. The prospect of being radically impaired for two fully awake hours is terrifying. That I wouldn’t remember the suffering afterward and that no one else would ever know is some comfort, but not nearly enough for me to go through those hours.

If you are with me so far, you should agree that there is something fundamentally different about being impaired while awake as one might be while dreaming even though the awake impairment will have no consequences for your subsequent life and even though when dreaming you have no inkling that you are.

Here is what I think explains the intuitions that I am going to continue to assume we share on the prospects of the impairments of dreaming and of similar impairments in waking life – even when focused down to the experience itself stripped of any sequalae. The model of the self in folk psychology, a model we all implicitly live by, worked its way down with variations from Plato through Christian and Muslim theology and Descartes. The self is consciousness, one single consciousness through a lifetime (and, per doctrine, beyond). It is the initiator of all our thoughts and actions, and the experiencer of all our experiences. Consciousness is transparent in that, e.g., I may be wrong about what I see, but not about what I seem to see.

Now, I think that this folk psychology model of the self can be shown to be importantly wrong when applied to waking life. There are lots of problems with the picture of a soul directing the movements of a body and “observing in consciousness” the products of the body’s senses, along with the soul’s own thoughts, memories, and imaginings. Memories are a special problem.

The model is, however, even worse when applied to dreaming. Dream images are something like imagined images, but where do they come from? We don’t experience them as something we have created or called forth. A possible answer is that they are, in effect, the imaginings of an unconscious part of the soul. That, however, compromises the unitary and transparent properties of classic soul theory – and In that respect it is a small step in the right direction!

To take a bigger step we need to shift our perspective from souls, and their de-mythologized surrogates, to brains. Dreams are a result of neuron firings one way or another, perhaps having, at least in part, a brain maintenance function of some sort or they being the byproduct of such a function. The sleep/dream thing is just something those neurons need to do. It would be an evolutionary negative if it too often caused much distress to the sleeper or to the impending sleeper.

You may prefer to avoid the neurons and opt for a formulation that your “unconscious self” knows that your dreaming stupidity, ignorance, disorientation, and mental imbalance are only adventitious oddities of the dream state. This unconscious-you knows when you are dreaming even though you don’t, and unconscious-you has back channels to dreaming-you and to thinking-about-napping-you ensuring that the former is not much bothered by its impairments and the latter not at all bothered by the prospects of dreaming.

My conclusion is that for folk psychology, without, at least, the addition of a robust “unconscious” to fill in for the reality of what the neurons are doing, it must be a mystery why we are not terrified of going to sleep.

(Descartes argued that we can never be certain that we are not dreaming. Unless “certain” is taken in an unreasonably strong sense, he was wrong.  Descartes and Knowing One is Awake (lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com))