LIE: Sleep is a waste

Lie:      Sleep is a waste.

Truth: Sleep is a rehearsal for death and resurrection.

I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel;
My heart also instructs me in the night seasons. — Psalm 16:7

It’s one of life’s most familiar daily routines but at the same time one of its greatest mysteries. It’s something we all do each night but something we could not avoid even if we tried. What am I talking about? It’s that phenomenon where we go involuntarily unconscious for hours, commonly known as: sleep.

Some look at sleep as a blessing, others as a perfunctory routine, or as an escape, as a necessary evil, or as a dreaded burden. And many see it as a waste of time and something to be avoided or at least minimized as much as possible.[1] We may nod at sleep’s obvious benefits but we still chafe at its apparent superfluity. ‘Yes,’ you may say, ‘I know I won’t be ‘on top of my game’ without eight hours of sleep, but I don’t have that much time to spare.’ There seems to be too much to do, too much to see and experience to ‘waste’ so much time on ‘doing nothing,’ laying there in bed. Our Protestant work ethic may too easily condemn us.

Sleep is also one of the most studied subjects in science. And yes, science can tell us all about its physiology, but what it cannot tell us is why we sleep. It remains one of the most enduring mysteries of life.

Why do we sleep?

So the big question is: why? If you believe in an all-wise Creator God who designs with purpose, why would he hard-wire this strange ‘practice’ into our bodily lives? And why would he design it such that it takes so much time? and that it actually requires a complete loss of consciousness and control?

I won’t pretend to have solved the depth of these mysteries. That would require an arrogance I (hopefully) don’t possess. But . . . I believe we have definite clues that point to a deeper purpose for sleep. All of these ‘whys’ stress the importance of ‘a good night’s sleep.’ The physical benefits notwithstanding, whatever they are, it’s important that we fully cooperate/work with this built-in, irreversible and uncontrollable bodily process.

So then, we sleep for at least three major reasons:

• to be reminded that we will die and rise again – to ‘rehearse’ our death and resurrection.
• to listen to and encounter God
• to surrender our soul to God.

Let’s now go into each of these:

1  We sleep to be reminded that we will die and rise again.

It may seem obvious, at least to some of you, but it’s worth stating plainly: sleep simulates death. As in death, so also in sleep: we lie still, with our eyes closed and wrapped in an altered state of consciousness. Also like death, we prepare for sleep (we lie down in a bed, etc), knowing and feeling its approach (hypnagogia)[2]. And also like death, sleep is inevitable and unavoidable. As much as we would like to stay awake, we simply cannot for very long. The Bible is full of references to death as sleep.[3]

But sleep’s corollary is also significant – our awakening is akin to our resurrection. We can usually lie down to sleep without fear because we know we will wake up in the morning. But waking is also beyond our control. Somehow our sleep cycles become increasingly shallow and – usually synchronized to the sun – we mysteriously open our eyes, slowly shedding the fog of our slumber.

Or: your alarm jolts you awake, penetrating into the depths of your sleep.[4] Either way, God has never failed to awaken us from a state that is beyond our control and, in so doing, has completed another training session/rehearsal of what will undoubtedly be two of the most important days of our lives – the day of our death and the subsequent day of our resurrection.

2  We sleep to listen to and even to encounter God.

We all can attest that sleep is an evergreen experience of strangeness. All of us have had vivid, even weird and inexplicable dreams. Also a good many have had dreams that they could say were somehow meaningful or even significant. And even a smaller number can say that they’ve had strange altered states of consciousness while they slept. All that to say, each night, when we lie down, we cannot predict what will happen as we sleep. Sleep is a dedicated period of time when suspension of disbelief is in effect. No matter how hard we may try, every night, we are fooled again. [5] Sometimes, especially after nightmares we are even genuinely relieved.

The scriptures are full of encounters with God in dreams: Jacob, Joseph, Daniel, Peter, Paul, John. All of them encountered God in their sleep. Clearly God can and does use dreams and visions of the night to speak to us, but we often must go to sleep to experience them.

Peter on the Day of Pentecost, quoting from the book of Joel, proclaimed:

But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams.
And on My menservants and on My maidservants
I will pour out My Spirit in those days;
And they shall prophesy. — Acts 2:16–18

The phrase ‘all flesh’ means everyone and anyone. The Spirit has been poured out on the church and we all are now qualified to prophesy according to his will.

That’s not to say that we will dream or see visions any night of the week, or any night that we choose. And we don’t necessarily need to be in a particular frame of mind to experience God or hear God in our sleep (but see the third point below). God is able by his Spirit to break into our sleep, our dreams; it’s no problem for him. But it’s also best to cooperate with him. In some ways these things are lost arts which the church must recover.

Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Tech, studied nighttime in the Western World from late medieval times until the Industrial Revolution and discovered the shocking, but common practice of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep.’ Before the advent of artificial light when the common man and woman had little to no light during the night hours, this ‘segmented sleep’ pattern was produced. Ekirch says:

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. In the absence of fuller descriptions, fragments in several languages that I have surveyed survive in sources ranging from depositions and diaries to imaginative literature. From these shards of information, we can piece together the essential features of this puzzling pattern of repose. The initial interval of slumber was usually referred to as “first sleep,” or less often “first nap” or “dead sleep.” . . . . The intervening period of consciousness — what Stevenson poetically labeled a “nightly resurrection” — bore no name, other than the generic term “watch” or “watching” to indicate a period of wakefulness that stemmed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “from disinclination or incapacity for sleep.” Two contrasting texts refer to the time of “first waking.” The succeeding interval of slumber was called “second” or “morning” sleep. Both phases lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before ultimately falling back to sleep.[6]

Ekirch says this curious phenomenon, so foreign to us, is caused simply when artificial light is removed. These conditions have been simulated in experiments. He goes on:

As suggested by recent experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the explanation likely rests in the darkness that enveloped most pre-industrial families. In attempting to recreate conditions of “prehistoric” sleep, Dr Thomas Wehr and his colleagues at NIMH found that human subjects, deprived at night of artificial light over a span of several weeks, eventually exhibited a pattern of broken slumber — astonishingly, one practically identical to that of pre-industrial households. Without artificial light for up to fourteen hours each night, Wehr’s subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two to three hours of quiet rest and reflection, then fell back asleep for four more hours before finally awakening for good. Significantly, the intervening period of “non-anxious wakefulness” possessed “an endocrinology all its own,” with visibly heightened levels of prolactin . . . . Wehr has likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.[7]

So why is this important? Ekirch again:

None were more familiar than the church with the dangers and temptations lurking in the dead of night. “Can Men break their sleep to mind the works of Darkness, and shall we not break ours,” asked Reverend Anthony Horneck, “for doing things, which become the Children of Light?” Certainly, there was no shortage of prayers intended to be recited “when you awake in the Night” or “at our first waking”[8]

He continues:

. . . people used this shrouded interval of solitude to immerse themselves in contemplation — to ponder events of the preceding day and to prepare for the arrival of dawn. At no other time, during the day or night, were distractions so few and privacy so great. “The night,” asserted James Pilkington, “is the quietest time to devise things in”; the “eyes are not troubled with looking at many things,” and the “senses are not drawn away.” . . . Little wonder that, for better or worse, nighttime enjoyed a far-flung reputation as the “mother of thoughtes,” many of them born while minds were conscious. “The night brings counsel,” echoed a popular proverb. The seventeenth-century merchant James Bovey reputedly from age fourteen kept a “Candle burning by him all night, with pen, inke, and paper, to write downe thoughts as they came into his head.”[9]

Have we then lost one of the major benefits and purposes of sleep? The evidence points strongly to that. But can we recover it? I don’t know, but we must not imagine that our sleep and our waking is a waste. We must cultivate an attitude of reverence and listening as we sleep and wake. Personally, many times I’ve gone to bed with a perplexing question on my mind and turned that question into a prayer as I slumbered. Then, when I awoke, I seemed to effortlessly receive an answer.

The whole apocalyptic book of Revelation was recorded when, as John said, he was ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.’ What precisely he meant by ‘in the Spirit’ and ‘on the Lord’s Day’ is not completely clear. But those conditions were apparently conducive or even necessary for John to see his revelation.

3  We sleep to practice surrendering our soul to God.

Another dying or perhaps even lost art, is the act of simply lying still and quiet in the dark and waiting for sleep to overtake us.[10] Too often today sleep overwhelms us as we engage in doing something else, some other activity, either reading or watching TV on the couch or surfing the web in bed. As a result, we often indelicately collapse from exhaustion where we are – the light still on, the TV still blaring, our phone fallen on the floor or lost in the bedcovers. Somehow we seem to imagine – irrationally so – that we can overcome sleep, that this time, we’ll stay awake. Yet when we do awaken, either in the middle of the night or in the morning, we shamefully realize we’ve been beaten again. You’d think that after a while we would learn, but the question is: why do we resist sleep at all?

In case it’s not perfectly obvious, let me spell it out as a simple syllogism:

IF sleep simulates death and
in death we encounter God,

THEN the surrender to sleep is a simulated, ‘rehearsal for’ or a conditioning of our surrender to God himself.

And that can be a scary proposition for someone who has not yet surrendered while awake.

So then God apparently intended that, in sleep, we learn to quietly accept our defenselessness and willingly and peacefully surrender our souls to God. Sleep comes for us all. And like God, it comes softly and almost imperceptibly. The truth is he is gentle and is well aware of our frailty and proneness to spurn him. Yet his grace, night after night, awaits us in the dark.

So then tonight, when you go to bed, he will be there in the stillness. Tonight, calm yourself until you can lie there quietly, and then whisper the words as you drift away: ‘Lord, I am yours.’

See also the introduction to this category: Lies attacking our self-understanding.

[1] The benefits of a good night’s sleep are well documented. It removes metabolic wastes, speeds healing, enhances memory and fortifies the immune system among many others.

[2] From Wikipedia: “Hypnagogia . . . is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. . . . Mental phenomena that may occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.” Captured on March 30, 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia.

[3] See for example: Psalm 13:3 and John 11:13.

[4] In sleep we appear to have lost all senses, but not entirely. God has so designed sleep that usually loud sounds or even bright lights – truly alarming things – will awaken us.

[5] Lucid dreaming is an exception to this rule.

[6] Ekirch, A Roger, Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles, source: The American Historical Review, Vol 106, No 2, April 2001, p 364–365.

[7] ibid, p 367–368.

[8] ibid, p 370–371.

[9] ibid, p 371–373.

[10] Of course we do become still and quiet eventually, but the point is, doing so intentionally is important in itself.