Sleep interrupts all conscious relations with the phenomenal world, and thus becomes one of the vital processes of spiritual regeneration

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

The first and most impressive fact of universal experience that we note as an incident of sleep is our sudden and complete dissociation from the world in which we live; the interruption of all conscious relations with matters which engross our attention during our waking hours. No matter how much we are absorbed by private or public affairs, no matter how vast the worldly interests that seem to be depending upon every waking hour, with what cares we are perplexed, what aspirations we indulge, they can postpone but a few hours at most the visit of this inexorable master, while they cannot diminish in the slightest degree the lawful measure of his exaction. Sleep, like death, knocks at the doors of kings’ palaces as well as poor men’s cottages. It is no respecter of persons, and while it is levying its tribute we are unconscious of everything we have done in the past and of all we were planning to do in the future.

Here we have one of the universal conditions of sleep which is coincident and in harmony with one of the supreme behests of a Christian life: utter deliverance from the domination of the phenomenal world; an entire emancipation, for these few sleeping hours, from the cares and ambitions of the life into which we were born, and to the indulgence of which we are inclined by nature to surrender the service of all our vital energies. If it be a good thing to live above the world, to regard our phenomenal life as transitory, as designed merely or mainly to educate us for a more elevated existence, to serve us as a means, not an end, then we have in sleep, apparently, an ally and coadjutor–at least to the extent of periodically delivering us from a servile dependence upon what ought to be a good slave, but is always a bad master. We here recognize an incontestable analogy at least between the phenomena of sleep and the providential process by which the regeneration of the human soul is to begun, and by which only such regeneration can be successfully prosecuted. The very existence of such an analogy is a fact of immeasurable interest and importance, for such analogies in the scheme of divine government are not accidental; are not without a purpose proportioned to the dignity of their august origin.

There are certain provisions of nature which may be justly regarded as auxiliaries to sleep and universal in their operation. At uniform intervals in every twenty-four hours of our life the sun withdraws its light and covers most of the habitable portions of our planet with a mantle of darkness. This not only invites sleep by withholding a stimulus which discourages it, but practically interrupts or modifies all forms of industrial activity; it interferes seriously with locomotion; it suspends most of the plans and occupations which engage our attention during the sunlit hours of the day, and emancipates us for a few hours of every day from the dominion of our natural propensities and passions, which engross so much of our time and thought by day. Nor is it only by the setting of the sun that we are invited daily to give pause for a few hours to our worldly strifes.

In sleep all the sensorial and other functions dependent upon or under the government of the will are relaxed. To secure this relaxation, we seek positions, places, and all other conditions best calculated to shelter us from light, noise, and all other awakening influences. Like man, the lower animals at such times choose a retired place, assume postures which demand no voluntary effort and which expose them least to the external forces which may chance to environ them. The serpent coils himself up so as to expose as little superficial surface as possible to disturbance; the bird conceals his head under his wing; porcupine covers his eyes with his tail; the skunk rolls himself into a ball; the dog covers his face with his paw.

The learned and pious Richard Baxter seems to have satisfied himself some centuries ago that sleep was anything but the state of repose which scientists usually assume it to be. In his profound Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul, he says:

“The phenomenon of sleep and dreaming, which hath been made use of to exalt the nature of matter, and depress the perfection of the soul; rightly considered shew the very contrary.

“The opposition of appearances observable in this state (of fatigue and activity, of insensibility and life at the same time) cannot fail to shew us the opposite natures of the two constituent parts of our composition. If all had been a blank of thought and consciousness in sleep, the soul would have seemed to be of the same nature with the body: if there had been no difference of thought and consciousness then and at other times, the body would have appeared to be of the same nature with the soul; no could the thinking principle have been so distinguishable.–Who that is rational would choose to be without these informations of an after existence?–The body no sooner sinks down in weariness and slumber, than this thing within enters fresh upon other scenes of action:–and this without the subserviency of its organs, which are then disabled from its functions. From which it appears, it can be otherwise applied to than by external objects through the sense. Now here is such a contrariety of natures obviously discoverable, that it is a wonder men could ever find in their hearts to ascribe them to the same thing.”

The marvelous changes wrought in our condition, as well morally as physically, that immediately follow a satisfactory night’s rest–changes in no respect less marvelous than those which at shut of day temporarily interrupt our communion with the phenomenal world–require an explanation which the popular nation of sleep does not give. “The morning hour,” says a German proverb, “has gold in its mouth.” If our sleep has been unimpaired by indiscreet indulgence of the appetites or passions, by unwonted anxieties or otherwise, we awake refreshed, with our strength renewed, our minds serene and clear, our passions calmed, our animosities soothed, with kindlier feelings towards our neighbors than at any other hour of the day. It is the hour, too, which from time immemorial has been consecrated by saint and savage to devotional exercises.

Was it not wisely said by the Rev. Horace Bushnell that “The night is the judgment-bar of the day. About all the reflection there is in the world is due, if not directly to the night, to the habits prepared and fashioned by it”?

“Everyone knows,” says one of the profoundest living interpreters of the phenomena of life,1 “how sweet is the restoration derived from one’s pillow in health; more wonderful even yet is that which we derive when sleep occurs at the crisis of severe disease. The nocturnal refreshment of the physical frame induces a similar restoration of the spiritual. Relaxed from the tension in which it is held towards the outer world while awake, during sleep the mind sinks into a condition comparable to that in which it lay before consciousness commenced; all images and shapes it is cognizant of by day either vanish or appear only as reflected pictures; unexcited from without, it gathers itself up into new force, new comprehension of its purpose; much that crossed the waking thoughts, scattered and entangled, becoming thereby sifted and arranged. Hence it is that our waking thoughts are often our truest and finest; and that dreams are sometimes eminent and wise; phenomena incompatible with the idea that we lie down like grass into our organic roots at night and are merely resuscitated as from a winter when we wake. Man is captured in sleep, not by death, but by his better nature; to-day runs in through a deeper day to become the parent of to-morrow, and to issue every morning, bright as the morning of life, and of life-size, from the peaceful womb of the cerebellum.”

Why should our minds be so much more alert in the morning, and problems which puzzled and defied solution at night be solved without a struggle? Why should lessons we tried in vain to memorize in the evening come to us when we awake, with verbal accuracy?–a common experience with school-children. So things we search for in vain at even-tide we still often know exactly where to look for after a night’s sleep. It is then, too, that we feel the charms of nature most keenly; that we are most disposed to extenuate the misconduct of friends and neighbors. In fact, there seems to be an extraordinary welling-up of charity in us during the hours consecrated to what Hesiod, the Greek poet, describes as the Brother of Death and Son of Night.

If, on the other hand, we are suddenly aroused from profound sleep, we are apt for a time to have a dazed feeling, not knowing exactly where we are or the precise import of what is said to us.

We act as though suddenly brought from more congenial and altogether different surroundings, from which we have been wrested reluctantly. Children are apt to cry; adults to scold. We are made happy if permitted to close our eyes again and return whence we came; to the company we had left.

1 Life: Its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena, by Leo H. Grindon, Lecturer on Botany at the Royal School of Medicine, Manchester. Sixth American edition. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1892, p.349.

“A man must be next to a devil,” said the Rev. Horace Bushnell, “who wakes angry. After his unconscious Sabbath he begins another day, and everyday is Monday. How beautifully thus we are drawn, by this kind economy of sleep, to the exercise of all good dispositions! The acrid and sour ingredients of evil, the grudges, the wounds of feeling, the hypochondriac suspicious, the black torments of misanthropy, the morose fault findings, are so far tempered and sweetened by God’s gentle discipline of sleep that we probably do not even conceive how demoniacally bitter they would be in no such kind interruptions broke their spell… Sleep is the perfectly passive side of our existence, and best prepares us to the sense of whatever is to be got by mere receptivity.”

Every parent is familiar with the smile that at times comes over a sleeping infant’s face, betraying as distinctly as ever when awake its experience of pleasing emotions. The elder Pliny takes notes of the occasional habit of infants sucking in their sleep; and also of their sometimes awaking suddenly with every symptom of terror and distress. Luscretius, in the noblest epic poem of the Latin tongue, speaks of race-horses, while sleeping, becoming suddenly bathed in perspiration, breathing heavily, and making their muscles strained as if starting in a race; also of the hunting-dogs while fast asleep moving their limbs and yelping as if in pursuit of the deer, until, awaking, they are sadly disabused of their delusions:

“Donec discussis redeant erroribus ad se.”

Bryant concludes “The Land of Dreams,” of which his sleeping daughter Julia is the heroine, with these striking lines:

1“But more, what Studies please, what most delight,
And fill MEns thoughts, they dream them o’re at Night;
The Lawyers plead, make Laws, the Souldiers fight;
The Merchants dream of storms, they hear them roar,
And Often shipwrecks leap, or swim to shore;
I think of Natur’s powers, my Mind pursues
Her Works, and e’en in Sleep invokes a Muse:
And other Studies too, which entertain
Mens waking thoughts, they dream them o’re again.

“And not in thoughtful Man alone, but Beast!
For often, sleeping Racers pant and sweat,
Breath short, as if they ran their second Heat;
As if the Barrier down, with eager pace
They strecht, as when contending for the Race.
And often Hounds, when Sleep hath closed their Eyes,
They toss, and tumble, and attempt to rise:
They open often, often snuff the Air,
As if they presst the footsteps of the Deer;
And sometimes wak’t pursue their fancy’d prey,
The fancy’d Deer, that seems to run away,
Till quite awak’t, the follow’d Shapes decay.
And softer Curs, that lie and sleep at home,
Do often rouse, and walk about the Room,
And bark, as if they saw some Strangers come.”

–De Rerum Natura, book iv.

“Dear maid, in they girlhood’s opening flower,
Scarce weaned from the love of childish play!
The tears on whose cheeks are but the shower
That freshens the blooms of early May!

“Thine eyes are closed, and over thy brow
Pass thoughtful shadows and joyous gleams,
And I know, by thy moving lips, that now
They spirit strays in the Land of dreams.
“Light-hearted maiden, oh, heed thy feet!
Oh, keep where that beam of Paradise falls:
And only wander where though mayst meet
The blessed one from its shining walls!

“So shalt though come from the Land of Dreams,
With love and peace to this world of strife:
And the light which over that border streams
Shall lie on the path of thy daily life.”

Another poet of promise, Mr. Watson, h as more recently given expression to the same thought in some classical lines, “To the Unknown God”:

“When, overarched by gorgeous Night,
I wave my trivial self away;
When all I was to all men’s sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God.”

Voltaire tells us that in one of his dreams he supped with M. Touron, who made the words and music for some verses which he sang. Voltaire in his dream also made some rhymes which he gives:

“Mon cher Touron, que tu m’enchantes
Par la douceur de tes accents.
Que tes vers sont doux et coolants.
Tu les fais comme to les chantes.”

“In another dream,” he adds, “I recited the first canto of the ‘Henriade,’ but differently from the text. Yesterday I dreamed that verses were recited at supper. Some one remarked that they were too clever–qu’il y avait trop d’esprit. I replied that the verses were a fete given to the soul, and ornaments were required for fetes. Thus I have in my dream said things that I would hardly have said when awake; I have had reflections in spite of myself, in which I had no part. I had neither will nor freedom, and yet I combined ideas with sagacity, and even with some genius. What then am I if not a machine?”1

1 Dictionnaire Philosophique, tit. “Somnambuler et Songer.”

In the same paper Voltaire made this important statement: “Whatever theory you adopt, whatever vain efforts you make to prove that your memory moves your brain, and that your brain moves your soul, you are obliged to admit that all your ideas come to you, in sleep, independently of you and in spite of you–your will has no part in them whatever. It is certain, then, that you may think seven or eight hours consecutively, without having the least desire to think, without even being aware that you think.”

We read of a monk who had been appointed to write an epitaph for the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Being much puzzled for an adjective applicable to Bede, he fell asleep, and in a dream, it is said, was supplied by an angel with the following lines:

“Hacce jacent fossa
Bedae venerabilis ossa.”

It was to this communication from the land of dreams it is owing that, since Bede’s death, “venerabilis” has been uniformly treated as a part of his name. This is the only explanation ever given of its selection.

By far the most voluminous and, after the Bible, the most instructive repository of facts relating to the mysteries of sleep in ay literature will be found in the writing of Emanuel Swedenborg, the most illustrious of the Swedish race, especially in the records which he made subsequent to the year 1747, when, as he claimed, his spiritual vision was opened. Of the nature of this illumination it will be sufficient to cite the following passage from a letter which he wrote to the King of Sweden in consequence of the seizure and suppression of some copies of a treatise he had written on Conjugial Love:

“I have already informed your Majesty, and beseech you to recall it to mind, that the Lord our Saviour manifested Himself to me in a sensible personal appearance; that He has commanded me to write what has been already done, and what I have still to do: that He was afterwards graciously pleased to endow me with the privilege of conversing with the Angels and Spirits, and to be in fellowship with them. I have already declared this more than once to your Majesties in the presence of all the Royal Family when they were graciously pleased to invite me to their table with five Senators, and several other persons; this was the only subject discoursed of during the repast. Of this I also spoke afterwards to several other Senators; and more openly to their Excellencies Count de Teffein, Count Bonde, and Count Hopken, who are still alive, and who were satisfied with the truth of it. I have declared the same in England, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, and at Paris, to Kings, Princes, and other particular persons, as well as to those in this kingdom. If the common report is believed, the Chancellor has declared, that what I have been reciting are untruths, although the very truth. To say that they cannot believe and give credit to sunch things, therein will I excuse them, for it is not in my power to place others in the same state that God has placed me, so as to be able to convince them by their own eyes and ears the truth of those deeds and things I have made publicly known. I have no ability to capacitate them to converse with Angels and Spirits, neither to work miracles to dispose or force their understandings, to comprehend what I say. When my writings are read with attention and cool reflection (in which many things are to be met with as hitherto unknown), it is easy enough to conclude, that I could not come by such knowledge, but by a real vision, and converse with those who are in the Spiritual World. As a further proof, I beseech their Excellencies to peruse what is contained in my Treatise on Conjugial Love, page 314 to 316. This book is in the hands of Count D’Ekleblad, and Count de Bjelke. If any doubt shall still remain, I am ready to testify with the most solemn oath that can be offered in this matter, that I have said nothing but essential and real Truth, without any mixture of deception. This knowledge is give to me from our Saviour, not for any particular merit of mine, but for the great concern of all Christians’ Salvation and Happiness; and as such, how can any venture to assert it as false? That these things may appear such as many have had no Conception of, and of consequence, that they cannot from thence credit, has nothing remarkable in it, for scarce any thing is known respecting them.”

In a letter to Mr. Ostinger, Swedenborg says further:

“To your Interrogation, if there is occasion for any Signs of an Extraordinary Kind to confirm Mankind that I am sent from the Lord to do what I do? I have in reply to observe, that at this day no Signs or Miracles will be given, because they operate only to an outward dead belief, and do not avail so as to convince the Inward State of the mind agreeable to the State of Free Will given to Man by the Lord, as the proper means of his Regeneration. That miracles only operate to an Exterior Faith or Belief, may be seen from the little effect they had on the people in Egypt, and the Children of Israel in the Desert, when the Lord Jehovah descended on Mount Sinai in their presence: and from what effect they had on the Jewish Nation, when they saw all the miracles our Saviour performed before them; for after all, did they not crucify him at last? So if the Lord was to appear now in the sky, attended with Angels and Trumpets, it would have no other effect than it had then. See Luke xvi. 29, 30, 31. The Signs that will be given at this day, will be an Illumination of the mind from the flowing Graces and Knowledge of the Lord, together with the reception of the Truths of the New Church, which will form the mind to a just perception of Heavenly Truth, that will work more effectually than any Miracles.

We have English translations of thirty-three substantial octavo volumes, consisting pretty exclusively of what Swedenborg saw or heard in the spiritual world while either asleep or in a state of practically suspended consciousness of the phenomenal world. Irrespective of the theological doctrines developed in most of these volumes, it is impossible to overrate their importance in enlightening us in regard to what goes on in our states of suspended consciousness, and above all, its conclusiveness against any theory of mental or spiritual inactivity while in that condition.

That Swedenborg was as credible a witness of what he believed he heard and saw in the spiritual world as either of the prophets of the old dispensation or apostles of the new, no one familiar with his life and occupations can seriously doubt. For the edification of such of my readers as may not have the advantage of such familiarity, I take the liberty of referring them to some authorities, to which they will hardly hesitate to defer, so far at least as to recognize the extraordinary activity of Swedenborg’s psychical nature during the twenty-eight later years of h is life, for the larger part of which time he claimed to be in pretty constant communication with the spiritual world.1 I have so many letters to write, so many questions to answer, that many a night is spent without any offering of sleep being brought to nature…

“The incessant and exhausting labors to which Calvin gave himself could not but tell on the strongest constitution: how much more on one so fragile as his. Amid many sufferings, however, and frequent attacks of sickness, he manfully pursued his course for twenty-eight years; nor was it till his frail body, torn by many and painful diseases–fever, asthma, stone, and gout–the fruits, for the most part, of his sedentary habits and unceasing activity–had, as it were, fallen to pieces around him–that his indomitable spirit relinquished the conflict… After he had retired from public labors he lingered for some months enduring the severest agony without a murmur and cheerfully attending to all the duties of a private kind which his disease left him strength to discharge.”

How different might have been the history of Protestantism in the world had Calvin given many hours to sleep as he did to professional work, is a problem upon which some reflection would not be wasted by any of us.

The records of these revelations are so accessible that I will not distend this volume by any analysis of them. To most persons I think I shall convey a sufficiently definite general idea of them for my purpose in referring to them here, by setting forth, as I propose to do in the appendix, Swedenborg’s account of interview in the spiritual world with Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, which I venture to commend to the attention of my readers.2

In connection with Swedenborg’s post-obit view of Calvin it may be instructive to read a few extracts from one of the most recent biographies of the great solifidian theologian:3

“While a boy at school, intensely devoted to study, he cared little for the pastimes in which his fellow-scholars indulged, he shunned society and was more disposed to censure the frivolities of those around him than to secure the solace of their companionship; severe to others, he was still more so to himself, and his pale face and attenuated frame bore witness at once to the rigor of his abstinence and the ardor with which he prosecuted his studies.”

While pursuing the study of law at Orleans the same writer says of him:

“At all times, indeed, a diligent student, he seems at this time to have been impelled by his zeal beyond those bounds which a wise regard to health would impose. It was his wont, after a frugal supper, to labor till midnight, and in the morning when he awoke he would, before he arose, recall and digest what he had read the previous day, so as to make it thoroughly his own. ‘By these protracted vigils,’ says Beza, ‘he secured indeed a solid erudition and an excellent memory; but it is probable he at the same time sowed the seeds of that disease which occasioned him various illnesses in after life and at last brought upon him premature death.’ (He died in his fifty-fourth year.)”

While settled over a parish in Geneva, where, “besides preaching every day in each alternate week, he taught theology three times in the week, attended weekly meetings of the consistory, read the Scriptures once a week in the congregation, carried on an extensive correspondence upon a multiplicity of subjects, and was engaged repeatedly in controversy with the opponents of his opinion,” he writes to a friend:

“I have not time to look out of my house at the blessed sun; and if things continue thus I shall forget what sort of appearance it has. When I have settled my usual business.

1 Appendix A.
2 Appendix B.
3 W. Lindsay Alexander, D.D., one of the Bible revisers

I have so many letters to write, so many questions to answer, that many a night is spent without any offering of sleep being brought to nature…

“The incessant and exhausting labors to which Calvin gave himself could not but tell on the strongest constitution: how much more on one so fragile as his. Amid many sufferings, however, and frequent attacks of sickness, he manfully pursued his course for twenty-eight years; nor was it till his frail body, torn by many and painful diseases–fever, asthma, stone, and gout–the fruits, for the most part, of his sedentary habits and unceasing activity–had, as it were, fallen to pieces around him–that his indomitable spirit relinquished the conflict… After he had retired from public labors he lingered for some months enduring the severest agony without a murmur and cheerfully attending to all the duties of a private kind which his disease left him strength to discharge.”

How different might have been the history of Protestantism in the world had Calvin given many hours to sleep as he did to professional work, is a problem upon which some reflection would not be wasted by any of us.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.