Why We Are Not Permitted to be Conscious of the Experiences of the Soul in Sleep

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

If by the immutable laws of our being the hours consecrated to sleep are, as I have attempted to show, of such vital importance to our spiritual development, the ordering of our life, so far as it may affect our sleep, assumes a corresponding importance. No argument is needed to prove that we should make it our study to avoid as far as possible everything calculated to interfere in the slightest degree with its completeness. All such disturbances may be presumed to come form our phenomenal life, and so far, at any rate, as they do, they impair the completeness of our isolation from the world and its works, and violate the sacred mysteries to which it is the presumptive purpose of sleep to admit the soul—our real self—for the reception of such spiritual instruction as we may be qualified to assimilate, without bringing away with us any knowledge that can interfere with the freedom of our will or with our personal responsibility for what we may do in our waking hours.

I say without bringing away anything that would interfere with the freedom of our will, because what goes on within us in our sleep is as sacred a mystery as any of the mysteries of our eternal sleep; nor is it difficult to divine a sufficient purpose for that mystery. If we were as conscious of our sleeping as of our waking life, and if our external memory, as Swedenborg calls it, could bring away our experiences while in that state; could reveal to us the treasures of our interior memory, it would interfere with our freedom in precisely the same way and degree as if we could foresee the influence of our acts and plans of yesterday upon all the future stages of our existence. Such knowledge would be fatal to our spiritual growth and to the freedom of our will, through which only righteousness thrives; would give place to a blind, senseless fatalism.

We may speculate about the purposes of Providence as revealed in the sequence of the events of our daily life, but we know nothing, and think little, if anything, of them when they occur. It is only long after their occurrence that we begin to realize how much more profoundly they affected the tenor of our lives than we had been protected by what we regarded as grievous disappointments; from what temptations, which we could never have resisted, we had been shielded by our ignorance, by our weaknesses, by discouragements, by poverty, by sickness, etc. If God in his providence makes us so blind to the consequence of what we do in our waking hours, the wisdom of which experience ultimately compels us not only to admit but be thankful for, there is no reason to question the divine wisdom in concealing from us what it is trying to do for us in our sleep when the god of this world is disarmed and powerless.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the things done in what is called civilized society that, consciously and unconsciously, interfere with the quality and quantity of our sleep. A volume would not suffice for such a record. I may only speak of them by classes.

First in importance among these I would place what we take into our mouths under the name or disguise of nourishment. There is scarcely a table laid in all our broad land on which will not be found more or less of the enemies of wholesome sleep: condiments selected primarily to stimulate the appetite, but provoking to gluttony and animal indulgence, regardless of the divine purposes for which we were endowed with these appetites, and with power both to guide and control them. It is a fact worthy of the profoundest consideration that about everything we take into our mouths, not simply for our nourishment, but to provoke our appetites and for the sole pleasure of gratifying them, discourages sleep.

“If one wishes to make others do wrong,” says Count Tolstoi, “he alcoholizes them. They make soldiers drunk before sending them into battle. At the time of the assault of Sebatopol all the French soldiers were drunk. It is well known that robbers, brigands, and prostitutes cannot dispense with alcohol. All the world agrees that the consumption of these narcotics has for its object stifling the remorse of conscience; and yet, in cases where the use of these exhilarants does not result in assassination, theft, and violence, they are not condemned.”

To the defense that a light exhilaration—that is to say, initial drunkenness, which is but a partial eclipse of the judgment—cannot produce very important consequences, the Count makes this clever reply:

“A famous Russian painter one day corrected a picture made by one of his pupils. He gave a few touches of his pencil here and there, but the result was such, nevertheless, that the pupil cried out, ‘You made but two or three marks on my picture, and I find it completely changed.’ The painter replied, ‘Art does not begin but where marks scarcely perceptible produce great changes.’ These remarks,” he adds, “are remarkably just, not only in relation to art, but all the conditions of human life.”

Dr. Franklin, in a letter written to a Miss on the art of procuring pleasant dreams, said:

“In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eat about twice as much as nature requires. Suppers are not bad, if we have not dined; but restless nights naturally follow hearty suppers after full dinners. Indeed, as there is a difference in constitutions, some rest well after these meals; it costs them only a frightful dream, and an apoplexy, after which they sleep till doomsday.”

Among the antisoporifics, next in importance come the apothecaries’ drug-poisons. Of these there are very few—I fear none—the direct or secondary action of which is not hostile to sleep. The uncorrupted tastes and instincts of the beasts of the field reject them all, as well in sickness as in health.

It is a curious illustration of the limitations of what we call civilization that the one art or science which we hedge about with the most arbitrary laws for the protection of its priesthood and ministrants, and which is relied upon to prevent or cure our diseases, should be the one organized professional body which practically employs few, if any, therapeutic agencies that do not impair, discourage, or prevent sleep, and to the same extent shorten life. If in the whole pharmacopoeia of those who claim to be “the regular medical faculty” there is a single drug which is not a poison and which is more or less actively hostile to sleep, it is one which is scarcely, if ever, used, except to impress the imagination rather than the disorder of the patient. Should any of my readers think this statement an exaggeration they will find little difficulty in ascertaining that it is not. The homoeopathists are compelled by the fundamental law of their therapeutics to ascertain the effects of every drug by testing them upon persons in sound health. In that way they have stored up in their literature most of all that is known of the direct effects of all the drugs that have proved to be sufficiently reactionary for therapeutical purposes, which means all drugs in general use. The reader has only to turn to Jahr’s Manual of Medicine or Herring’s Condensed Materia Medica to satisfy himself of the insomniac influences which radiate from every apothecary’s shop.

With drug-poisons should be classed nearly, if not quite, all fermented drinks—the most costly part of most people’s diet who indulge in them at all—coffee, tea, tobacco, spices, and most of the constantly multiplying tonics and condiments of the table. All of them have a tendency, directly or indirectly, to discourage or impair sleep, and, as such, are hostes humani generis. Their interference with sleep, though perhaps the most serious, is very far from being their only pathogenetic influence.

The late Dr. Alonzo Clark, who for years stood quite at the head of his profession as a consulting physician in New York City, is quoted as authority for saying: “All curative agents, so called, are poisons, and, as a consequence, every dose diminishes the patient’s vitality.” I doubt whether this view of drugs would be seriously contested by any of his professional brethren of good standing.

The late venerable Professor Joseph M. Smith, M.D., said: “All medicines which enter the circulation poison the blood in the same manner as do the poisons that produce the disease. Drugs do not cure disease. Digitalis has hurried thousands to the grave. Prussic acid was once extensively used in the treatment of consumption, both in Europe and America, but its reputation is lost. Thousands of patients were treated with it, but not a case was benefited. On the contrary, hundred were hurried to the grave.”

Digitalis is regarded by old-school physicians as a specific for heart-failure. Here are its symptoms as recorded in Jahr’s manual:

Sleep—Drowsiness in the day and somnolency interrupted by convulsive vomiting; at night, half sleep with agitation; nocturnal sleep, interrupted by anxious dreams, with starts.

R. Clarke Newton, in his treatise on Opium and Alcohol, says:

“Sleeplessness means not merely unrest, but starvation of the cerebrum. The only cause for regret in these cases is that the blunder should ever be committed of supposing that a stupefying drug which throws the brain into a condition that mimics and burlesques sleep can do good. It is deceptive to give narcotics in a case of this type. The stupor simply masks the danger. Better far let the sleepless patient exhaust himself than stupefy him. Chloral bromide and the rest of the poisons that produce a semblance of sleep are so many snares in such cases. Sleeplessness is a malady of the most formidable character, but it is not to be treated by intoxicating the organ upon which the stress of the trouble falls. Suicide, which occurs at the very outset of derangement, and is apt to appear a sane act, is the logical issue of failure of nutrition that results from want of sleep.”

It is a fact now recognized by the medical profession that the use of narcotics, fermented liquors, and other intoxicants by which the people of all nations seek pleasure—simple oblivion of the troubles of life or of its sorrows, of its chagrins or of destitution—produce temporarily precisely the condition in which a man finds himself in a dream. The faculty explain it by lesions, obstructions, disorganizations of tissues, cells, nerve centres, liver and kidneys, etc. These are physical changes incident to the use of these disorganizing agencies. In point of fact, it is these disorganizing agencies that produce the partial, sometimes temporary, sometimes chronic, insensibility to mental or physical troubles by impairing our consciousness of them, just as our consciousness of them is totally suspended in sleep and partially suspended in dreams when we have begun to awake. These dreams are sometimes prolonged, and result in what is commonly termed dementia.

Lasegue tells us that the alcoholic delirium is not a delirium, but a dream. Max-Simon says: “The alcoholic patient commences his delirium in his dream during sleep and continues it on awaking, while other lunatics, melancholics, paralytics, maniacs, find in sleep a truce to their delirium.”

At first the dream of the alcoholic appears as a passing trouble and ceases on awakening. It is only a nightmare. After a while the dream is prolonged beyond the awakening, and it exteriorizes itself in a sort of tranquilized delirium. Finally, auto-intoxication reaches its maximum in that peculiar mental state described first by an eminent French physician as mental confusion. The recollection of the dream may survive the dream itself for some time, and become a sort of subacute delirium, to which Baillarger has given the name of fixed ideas.

While this similarity between dreams and a person intoxicated by narcotics, alcoholics, hashish, or any of the thousand drugs to which people have recourse for temporary alleviation of pain or sorrow, distress or depression of any kind, is so universally recognized by the medical faculty, it seems to have occurred to none of them that the remedy for relief in every case is precisely the same as that which is sought through sleep—to make us insensible to our troubles and forget the world in which they originate. Their similarity to dreams consists in the insensibility produced by these drugs—that is, the partial suspension of consciousness. What a deplorable fact it is that, instead of sleep, so large a proportion of the human race resort to these noxious substitutes for it! What a mercy that where the will is too weak to resist the temptation to resort to these substitutes, “the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid”!

The comes the strife for wealth, and power, and position among men” the undue accumulation of cares and responsibilities, the result in most cases of unbridled ambition, vanity, or greed.

It is the middle-aged and old who suffer most from this infirmity.

“Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where he lodges sleep can never lie;
But where unbruised youth, with unstuffed brain,
Doth crouch his limbs, there sleep doth reign.”

Whenever a man has reached threescore-and-ten, and in railway parlance, is started on the down grade, he should study to simplify his life so as to never be required to draw upon his reserves, nor work under pressure, or with a conscious overdraft of nervous force. A neglect of this precaution is pretty certain to interfere with both the quantity and quality of our sleep, and sooner or later to compel a resort to stimulants of one kind or another, by which we borrow for the day the strength of tomorrow, thus speedily to become hopelessly indebted to nature, the most inexorable of creditors.

Speaking of reports, which but too frequently meet our eyes in the public prints, of men prominent in religious movements who have disgraced themselves and discredited the faith they professed by ignominious peculations, embezzlements, and frauds, the late Dr. A. P. Peabody, of Harvard University, said:

“We are not surprised that these instances have been placed and kept prominently before the community; for such cases are so rare as justly to arrest grave attention and excite emphatic comment. So far as we know, they are, all of them, cases in which there had been for a long period such an engrossment in multifarious, crowding, and perplexing business operations that the religious life was physically impossible, the quietness essential to devotion unattainable, supersensual themes of thought excluded by a necessity, self-imposed indeed, but imposed—there is reason to believe—before the first steps in the direction of over guilt and shame. No Christian of sane mind will pretend or imagine that church-going with the inward ear closed and deafened, the form of Christian communion without the spirit of the cross, Sunday overlaid by the cares of the preceding and the forecast shadows of the coming week, are a moral specific; and many who call, and perhaps think, themselves Christians are in intense need of precisely the lessons which these disasters among their own brotherhood may teach.”

All the appetites, propensities, lusts, and passions which we cannot control are incidental to, and evidences of, our unregenerate nature; are the weaknesses of the flesh which hit is the end and purpose of our probationary life on earth to subdue. It is a fact most important, early to learn and never to lose sight of, that all these appetites, propensities, and passions are unrelenting enemies of sleep. It is the most impressive illustration of the inflexible logic of Providence that as they all, if allowed to free rein, tend to impair the health, blunt the senses one by one, diminish, and finally extinguish, the enjoyment they were designed to yield; they, in that way, like old age, are permitted to serve in a measure the purposes of sleep, in detaching man from the world by depriving him of the means of enjoying what he persists in abusing, and thus of “with-drawing him from his purpose, and in keeping him from the pit.”

It would be well for every one to realize that all the virtues favor sleep and all the vices discourage it. In the gratification of our appetites it is our highest duty to respect the laws of our being which impose self-control. Whether we eat too much, or drink too much, or devote too large a portion of our time and strength to any employment or amusement, the first rebuke which nature administers for such intemperance is a change in the quantity or quality of our sleep; conscience, attended by the dragons of remorse, follows us to our chamber and tells us that sleep shall not refresh us until we respect the laws of our being, which are the ordinances of our Creator, will be the sufficiency of our rest. In the degree that we disregard them will be its insufficiency.

The desire—nay, the necessity—for sleep should be regarded as a providential arrangement to induce us to cultivate the virtues most favorable to its enjoyment, just as hunger and thirst are the agents of Providence for teaching us to be frugal, industrious, and temperate, that they may be reasonably gratified.

If these things be true about sleep, they obviously impose duties upon the pulpit, upon the press, and upon all human society which are sadly neglected.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.