Most Conspicuous Changes During Sleep

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

Of the changes which distinguish our condition in the morning from our condition in the evening, the most conspicuous are not physical, but psychical. The moral side of our being seems for the time to have been in the ascendant. Having ceased for some hours to be preoccupied with what is purely personal, narrow, and narrowing, the world’s hold upon our thoughts and affections having been temporarily broken we seem to have been at liberty for a time to realize that we are a substantive part of the universal life; to feel the spirit of the ages of which we are a product; to look up from nature to nature’s God, its author, and to h is great world as a manifestation of Him rather than a product of human ingenuity and pretension; all this undisturbed by the calculations and ambitions of our day-lit life.

It was thus “to overcome the world,” or at least to assist us in it, that the Mosaic law set apart one day in seven for our spiritual reflection, and enjoined upon us to do no manner of work. It was for the like purpose we were directed, when we pray, to enter into our inner chamber and shut our door, that we be not distracted by what the world may think or say or be to us while we commune with our Father in heaven. May we not–do we not have a more perfect seclusion from the world in our sleep, to help us to such a direct, prolonged, and undisturbed communion than is possible at any other time? Is it not necessary for all of us or at least for much the larger proportion of the world who otherwise might never seek this closer communion with God, to be subjected to the operation of a law which for a portion of every day reduces them to a condition in which nothing operates to prevent their giving their attention to the divine messengers that are continually struggling for an opportunity to be heard? This idea appears to have been the happy inspiration of one of our as yet unpublished poets in the following sonnet:

“If though wouldst look life’s problem in the face,
And comprehend her mystic countenance,
Seek, in the early morn, ere yet the grace
Of dewdrops has been withered by the sun,
Some solitary glen or truant brook,
And scan, freed from results of yesterday,
The ill-deciphered pages of life’s book:
And ere to-day’s vicissitudes have cast
Their shadows o’er the judgment, thou shalt see
They blessings will confront thee then, and ask
A recognizing smile. The world shall seem
A higher fact,–the heart of man more wise,
The very universe on larger plan,–
The glamour of day-dawn within thine eyes.”1

The changes wrought in us while sleeping, as a rule, vary according to the amount of sleep we require, and that varies with our age. In our childhood we require far more sleep than at later periods of life, and the younger we are, the more we need. Infants, in whom we are able to discern few, if any, traces of a moral sense, sleep most of the time. It is during this period, before their rationality is developed, and before they come under the influence of the world and its temptations, which are so necessary to our spiritual growth later in life–in other words, before the moral sense can be successfully appealed to, that the seed is planted by parental love, which is destined to grow and shelter them from those temptations when they shall assail. The longer hours which infancy requires for sleep are proportioned to their greater spiritual needs. An infant would perish in a few hours if allowed no more sleep than would suffice for an adult.

Old people, whose ties to the world not already severed are daily weakening, spend fewer hours in sleep, as a rule, than the younger of any age.

Why these discriminations of nature between the old, the middle-aged, and the infant? It is not casual, but uniform and universal. Did fatigue create a need for repose, why should the octogenarian, trembling with weakness, sleep least?

Why should the infant, who does nothing to induce fatigue, and doubles it weight out of its overflowing abundance of life, in a few months, sleep many times as much as its grandparents? Obviously because we tend to become less active and more contemplative in our declining years. The world has been gradually losing its charm, its former allurements cease to distract; the mind feeds upon the spiritual experiences of a long life, less disturbed than during our earlier years by the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

They therefore may be presumed to need less sleep or to be in a spiritual condition to profit less for any moral purpose by sleep than either the stalwart adult or the puling infant. In the inspired language of the poet Walker.

“The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in the light through chinks that Time has made.”

Following this line of thought, we should pause to take note of the fact that one by one the several senses by which we hold communion with the visible world cease to render their wonted service as we advance into the autumn of life. The eyes, to use Milton’s expression, “their seeing have forgot,” the ears their hearing, the skin its sensibility, and so on. Why, except that the messages which it is the function of the senses to bring to us from the external world are becoming less needful to us or more hurtful, or that the interruption of those messages is required to supplement the educational offices for which the hours of sleep, usual at that age, were inadequate? With some the senses are dulled earlier than with others. May not this impairment of sensibility reflect a corresponding spiritual or moral condition? Of course, this impairment is a result, not a final cause or purpose. of what is it so likely to be the result as of a divine purpose, similar to that we are ascribing to sleep, or diminishing or checking the interference of the phenomenal world with our spiritual growth, and an aid to us in overcoming the world, or, rather, our sense of our personal importance to the world?

1 Maria Kennedy Tod.

Rest implies inactivity, a suspension of effort and exertion, the substitution of idleness for labor. If, therefore, all our nobler faculties have been resting during the night, have been doing nothing, by the operation of what force or by what necromancy are we so transfigured in the morning?

The effect of sleep upon the demands of our stomach is also mysterious. Few people take less than three meals daily, if they can help it, yet a man may sleep from twelve to fifteen hours–cases are recorded of persons sleeping much longer–without waking, and of course without taking any nourishment whatsoever.

Wraxall, in his Memoirs, tells us that William Pitt, the most eminent minister of George III. of England, having been much disturbed by a variety of painful political occurrences, “drove out to pass the night with Dundas at Wimbledon. After supper the minister withdrew to his chamber, having given his servant directions to call him at seven on the ensuing morning. No sooner had Pitt retired than Dundas, conscious how much the minister stood in need of repose, repaired to his apartment, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket, at the same time enjoining the valley on no consideration to disturb his master, but to allow him to sleep as long as nature required. It is a truth that Pitt neither awoke nor called any person till half-past four in the afternoon of the following day, when Dundas entering his room together with his servant, found him still in so deep a sleep that it became necessary to shake in order to awaken him. He had slept uninterruptedly during more than sixteen hours.”

Such log naps, we fancy, are by no means uncommon, but are not heard of–like the heroes before Agamemnon–carent quia vate sacro.

It is reported of Lord Brougham that when he returned home after his brilliant and exhausting defence of Queen Caroline he went at once to bed, with orders not to be disturbed, however long he might sleep–orders which his household obeyed, though with astonishment deepening into something like terror as the young lawyer’s nap prolonged itself for nearly eight-and-forty=hours. His physician afterwards declared that this sleep had saved him from brain fever, though probably only the marvelously recuperative powers which he possessed enabled him to take nature’s remedy in one such mighty dose.

Yet all this time the digestion and other functions of the body have been going on very much as they are wont during the waking hours. It thus appears that we require nourishment three or four times more frequently while awake than while sleeping. Yet–and here is another surprise–we usually awake in the morning without either hunger or faintness, one or the other of which always accompanies an unusually long fast when awake.

The first and morning meal is ordinarily the lightest of the day among people who are free to consult their tastes about their hours for eating. How shall we explain this strange discrepancy in the actions of the stomach in the daytime and at night? It is no answer to say that we work in the daytime, hence waste and hunger; for the same necessity for frequent nourishment during the day is as surely experienced by a person taking little or no physical exercise as by the bricklayer or the wood-sawyer.

Obviously a condition of things has been super induced by sleep which involves not only a discontinuance of intercourse with the phenomenal world, but a suspension of some of its sternest exactions.

There is another extraordinary result of sleep which, so far as I know, has never been remarked upon, but which accredits, if it does not explain, some of the stores related in the Bible which put our faith in the divine origin of that record to the severest test.

When one lays himself down upon h is bed or couch, however tired, if awake, he rarely remains long in any one position. At frequent intervals he feels an impulse to turn over or move some of his limbs, or otherwise relieve himself from what has become an uncomfortable position.

If he falls asleep, however, though he has the ground for a bed and a log or even a stone for a pillow, he may lie quietly for many hours without the slightest motion of any kind save that incident to involuntary respiration. Nor, when he awakes, will he experience any discomfort in any part of his body, not even in that which has sustained the most pressure–a pressure which while awake he would not contentedly have quietly endured for five minutes.

Whence this difference? There is no change in the physical condition of the sleeper that will account for it. His body weighs no less, the blood circulates as freely in the veins, and when he awakes, as a rule, he not only may have no sense of pain or discomfort anywhere, but, on the contrary, feel refreshed at every point. What has occasioned this mysterious change in the relations of causes and effects on a sleeping from those operations on a waking man?

We are told that Jacob, the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, on his journey towards Padan Aram in quest of a wife, “lighted upon certain place and tarried there all night, because the sun was set.” (We are not told that he was even tired.) “And he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep.” In his sleep the young man had dreams of an inconceivably glorious future. When he awoke he exclaimed: “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not; this is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven.” He rose, took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon it. And he called the name of that place Bethel.

What change did sleep work in Jacob during that night, with a stone for his pillow, that he should set that stone up for a monument and pour oil upon the top of it and finally make of it the dwelling-place of his God?

The reason assigned in the sacred record is that during his sleep he “beheld a ladder set upon the earth and the top of it reached to heaven, and he beheld angels, the messengers from God, ascending the descending on it, and the Lord standing above it, who, besides promising that Jacob’s seed should be as the dust of the earth for multitude, and that in his seed should all the families of the earth be blessed, added, “Behold I am with thee and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee again unto this land; for I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.”

No one will pretend that a communication of such incalculable importance would ever be made by any one, least of all by the God of gods, to one whose mind was, like his body, in a deep sleep. Is it not equally clear that the peculiar time for making it was selected because in his waking hours Jacob would not have been in a condition to receive it?

Who shall say that such ladders are or have ever been uncommon means of communication between the inhabitants of the heavens and the earth, and that angels are not frequently ascending and descending them with heavenly messages to unconscious sleepers?

As we descend in the scale of organized life, the proportion of time spent in sleep seems to increase until we reach a point where life is apparently a continuous sleep. “An oyster,” says Buffon, “Which does not seem to have any sensible exterior movement nor external sense, is a creature formed to sleep always. A vegetable is in this sense but an animal that sleeps, and, in general, the functions of every organized being lacking power of movement and the senses may be compared to the functions of an animal who should be constrained by nature to sleep continually.

“In the animal the state of sleeps is not an accidental one, occasioned by the greater or less exercise of its faculties while awake; it is, on the contrary, an essential mode of being, which serves as the base of all animal economy. Our existence begins in sleep; the fetus sleeps almost continually, and the infant sleeps more hours than it is awake.

“Sleep, which appears to be a purely passive state, a species of death, is, on the contrary, the first state of the living animal and foundation of life.

It is not a privation, an annihilation; it is a mode of being, a style of existence as real and more general than any other. We exist in this state before existing in any other; all organized beings which have not the sense exist in this state only, while none exist in a state of continual movement, and all existences participate more or less in this state of repose.”1

At the close of a laborious day we invariably, if in health, feel a languor which prompts us to take a position in which the weight of our bodies will be so distributed as to invite sleep–for which, if in health, we do not have to wait long. The interval between its arrival and our laying ourselves in a recumbent position is usually one of exquisite pleasure.

All our impressions of sleep are formed before it arrives and after it begins to leave. We enjoy what we call going to sleep, and we enjoy the feelings we experience after we have slept, but during sleep we have no consciousness of any sensation which we have any right to attribute directly and exclusively to it, or of which our sense can take cognizance. While it is thus made pleasant for us to close our eyes and relax our hold upon the world for a portion of every twenty-four hours, we have no more right to infer that it is merely that we may remain in a pleasing state of inactivity and insensibility than we have to infer that the final purpose of hunger is to secure us the gratifications of the palate, or the final purpose of sexual attraction is merely to gratify our sensuality. As in both these cases, the ends to be reached are of the most far-reaching character, and the desires are given that the means for the accomplishment of those ends should not be neglected, so our diurnal desire for sleep is manifestly designed to promote in us the growth and development of spiritual graces in some way, for which the waking hours are less propitious.

Our Maker could have no other design in the perpetuation of our race. Why should Infinite Wisdom have assigned a less important function for the very considerable portion of our lives during which our consciousness is suspended in sleep than to the function of hunger or lust?

1 “Discours sur la Nature des Animaux.” OEuvres de Buffon. Edition Flourens, vol. ii. p.331.

Why should we resist the obvious implication that in falling asleep we are being gradually separated from the world of the senses, and, as they seem to recede that something flows into us which yields a pleasure that grows more unmixed and absolute until consciousness of our external and natural life altogether ceases?

“As angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep;
So Some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes
And into glory peep.”

Pausanias, in his historic tour in Greece, describes a temple erected in honor of Æsculapius, in the court of which he found the figure of Oneiros, the god of dreams, and beside it another of Hypnos, of Sleep, putting a lion to sleep. To this latter figure, says pausanias, they had given the name of Epidotes, or the Giver.1

“So He giveth his beloved in their sleep.”

From the writings of Iamblichus, at one time the head of the school of Neo-Platonists, it appears that the view here taken of sleep, as having a higher function than simply the reparation of waste, was shared some fifteen centuries ago by thoughtful men, who did not claim to speak by divine inspiration. In a letter compiled from his writings, and quoted by R. A. Vaughan in his Hours with the Mystics, he says:

“There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have been told concerning the sacred sleep and divination by dreams. I explain it thus:

“The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and enters, as one emancipated, on its divine life of intelligence. Then, as the noble faculty which beholds the objects that truly are the objects in the world of intelligence stirs within and awakens to its power, who can be surprised that the mind, which contains in itself the principles of all that happens, should, in this, the state of liberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which will make that future what it is to be? The nobler part of the soul is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods.

“Recorded examples of this are numerous and well authenticated; instances occur, too, every day. Numbers of sick, by sleeping in the temple of Æsculapius, have had their cure revealed to them in dreams vouchsafed by the god. Would not Alexander’s army have perished but for a dream, in which Dionysius pointed out the means of safety?

1From the Greek word έπιδίδωμι, to increase, to fatten, to give freely, to give as a benevolence.

Was not the siege of Aphritis raised through a dream sent by Jupitor Ammon to Lysander? The night-time of the body is the daytime of the soul.”

Tradition accounts for Mohammed’s being among the prophets in this wise: While indulging in spiritual meditations and repeating pious exercises on Mount Hira in the month of Ramedan, the Angel Gabriel came to him by night, as he was sleeping, held a silken scroll before him, and required him, though not knowing how to read, to recite what was written on the scroll. The words thus communicated remained graven on his memory, and ran as follows:

“Read! In the name of the Lord who created man from a drop. Read! For the Lord is the Most High, who hath taught by the pen to man what he knew not. Nay truly, man walketh in delusion when he deems that he suffices for himself. To thy Lord they must all return.”

This brief announcement of the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed in his sleep deserves to be regarded as the corner-stone of the religion of the most numerous of the monotheistic sects in the world to this day–a religion which Napoleon I. characteristically pronounced superior to Christianity in that it conquered half the world in ten years, while Christianity took three hundred years to establish itself.

Being lodged in the villa of a friend, after he had lain restless and wakeful a great part of the night, he fell into a sound sleep near break of day, and when he waked, about eight in the morning, told his dream to those round him: That as he seemed to be wandering disconsolate in a lonely place, Caius Marius, with his fasces wreathed with laurel, accosted him, and demanded why he was so melancholy; and when he answered that he was driven out of his country by violence, Marius took him by the hand, and, bidding him be of courage, ordered the next lector to conduct him into his monument, telling him that there he should find safety. Upon this the company presently cried out that he would have a quick and glorious return. All of which was exactly fulfilled; for his restoration was decreed in a certain temple built by Marius, and, for that reason, called Marius’s Monument, where the Senate happened to be assembled on that occasion.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.