A common motif in the history of literature is to compare the stupor of ignorance with slumber.  Drawing on the image of the body at rest, ignorance is likened to the heavy and sluggish drag of sleep, where the mind drifts in impervious suspension untroubled even by the faintest stirrings of the outside world. In this analogy, ignorance becomes a state of arrested interiority. When you sleep, the sensory gates narrow and the body slackens; consciousness retracts from its engagement with the world and the self no longer registers stimuli with precision or deliberates with the necessitated force as when one is awake and more discriminating. The horizon of meaning, that is, the field in which objects appear as intelligible and distinct, is gently effaced until a slow dimming of the world takes over one’s senses.

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“Sweet is the rest in the arms of Sleep,” writes Euripides in the Hippolytus, “...and sweet the forgetfulness that comes with it.”

Sleep holds a pervading fascination in our history because it breaks the chain of continuity we experience in the daytime. In sleep, nothing carries over to the state of awake-ness. One cannot meaningfully speak about sleep in the present tense, and therefore, we can only report about it in reconstructed form. 

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When you wake up, there is overwhelming evidence that you have been temporally—and sometimes spatially—moved, but there are no steady impressions that can be recalled while one is in the state of sleep. The sleeper, in his peaceful slumber, struggles to piece the world together in a way that accounts for that dark, unchartable interval.

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From the moment we are born, it is immediately absorbed into the structure of life. It becomes part of the ordinary pattern in our biological existence as flesh and remembering animals. We yield to it night after night, without questioning what it means to regularly vanish from the world. Hours pass unaccounted before the eclipse of awareness makes it passing, and then suddenly, light spills through the shade, and the day begins anew.

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There are some curious explanations as to why we are beholden to this phenomenon. 

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Some involve the primal fantasy of the pre-individuated state, longing, as it were, for the boundless feeling of dissolution before one arrived into the world. And thus Novalis writes in the Hyms to the Night (Hymen an die Nacht, 1800):

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"To us be hallowed endless Night,

Hallowed eternal slumber!

The day hath withered us with light,

And troubles beyond number.

No more ‘mong strangers would we roam;

We seek our Father, and our home."

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The development of the neural sciences has given credence to the suggestion that intrauterine memory becomes imprinted in the fragile brains of the fetus. When the nervous system begins forming dense and permanent pathways of registration in the synaptogenesis state, fetuses demonstrate habituation, with evidence of short‑term memory persisting weeks after the postnatal period. This lends empirical support to the psychoanalytic intuition that birth is not a beginning but a violent severance from a prior state of completeness. 

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The archaic residue of womb-imagery in the collective imagination becomes an early experience of "rupture" that leaves a lasting impression on the psyche. Otto Rank, in writing about the trauma of birth, came to the conclusion that “The fetus enjoys a completely protected and pleasurable existence [in the womb]… interrupted only by the act of birth, wrenching, tumultuous, traumatic.” 

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The rupture of birth introduces anxiety, disorientation, and the first sensation of loss in the child. It is from this dislocation that the lifelong drive for the primal womb arises. 

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We long for that lost enclosure, for the soft and suspended state in which the body is part of a unitary oceanisches Gefühl. Even in moments of vulnerability or retreat, the body assumes a familiar shape where the knees are drawn and the back curls forward, accompanied by the arms wrapping inwardly as if tracing the memory of a fetal posture. 

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A curious fact about the psychology of sleep is that many of the symptomatic manifestations associated with the fear of sleep do not pertain to the act of sleeping itself, but to the secondary phenomena that constellate around it. Somniphobia carries the hallmarks of a conditioned fear generalization structure, in which sufferers fixate on the peripheral features that symbolically attach to the feared state. Distress typically arises from anticipated experiences such as nightmares, episodes of sleep paralysis,  hallucinatory intrusions, or the possibility of dying, but never the lonesome fact of sleep. 

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In diagnostic terms (i.e. DSM-5/DSM-5‑TR and even the ICD‑10/ICD‑11), there is no formal sub‑type of somniphobia distinguishing a fear of “sleep itself” from a fear of associated phenomena, Both are subsumed under Specific Phobia (DSM‑5 code for specific phobia) with the specifier of sleep as the feared situation/object. 

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The surrounding conditions around the state of sleep becomes the primary locus of anxiety, but sleep itself is treated as the nominal referent through which symbolic fears are organized.

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The interesting contention in these statements is that we, as humans, are seemingly predisposed to sleepiness. We seek conditions that mimic withdrawal from the world, and as as sleeping things, we are expected to be receptive when this complete blanketing of consciousness does arrive. 

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The everyday person does not see anything unnatural in this surrender. It is only really the philosopher and the natural scientist—those who carve nature at its joints—with their suspicions about banal and self-evident objects, that sees anything worthwhile to interrogate in sleep. But to the uninvolved person, sleep is as natural as nightfall.  

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As sleepers, Whitman says, 

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"The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, 

the European and American are hand in hand, 

Learn’d and unlearn’d are hand in hand, 

and male and female are hand in hand..." 

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We lose our grip in the tangible manifold of things, and become enveloped by a diffused, pre-conceptual order that can sometimes appear outlandish or outright cartoon-like. The mind, no longer tethered to the tangible world immediately impinging upon its senses, generates pictures from the fragments of wakefulness. Consequently, memory, sensation, or buried emotions become the provisional materials for a caricature of the world.

In this way, it is possible to characterize the state of sleep as antithetical to the rational state of wakefulness, insofar as sleep entails the suspension of mental faculties associated with rational agency. If we speak of rationality minimally as the capacity for propositional reasoning, belief revision, self-reflective thought, and deliberative action, then sleep represents a state in which these capacities are either radically diminished or entirely absent. The sleeper does not entertain beliefs in the standard sense, does not assess evidence, cannot form intentions, and lacks access to inferential structures required for justification or reasoning. In introducing this bifurcation, we also introduce the epistemological origins of the "waking" metaphor in conspiratorial discourse. But this will be pursued later.

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Freud drew our attention to the ways in which the body generates images using the pressures of the body, and its storehouse of affective or mnestic history. The mind shapes germinal narratives through fantasies that gather around unspoken conflicts, and forms a thread of wishful meaning that is bound to the mechanisms of dream-logic. These images arise from the associative pressure of many, often contradictory psychic excitations, and are synthesized into a picture that has no regard for what we may consider the "waking" life. 

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Freud’s early metapsychological period (1915-1917) conceptualized sleep as the state of mental activity in which life becomes organized around internal pressures. These demands, composed of repressed impulses and instinctual energies, restructure the thresholds of the mental systems by suspending the critical function of the preconscious, and translating latent impulses into disguised images in order to preserve the sleeper from awakening. This is Freud's "guardian of sleep" hypothesis in very brief terms.

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In inhibiting motor action and inducing cathexis, sleep creates the economic and topographical conditions necessary for unconscious processes to dominate psychic activity without triggering motor or mental discharges in the conscious peripheries of the dreamer.

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The mind metabolizes inner and outer impingements through mechanisms that transform the stimulus into hallucinatory pictures which are saturated with latent desires. 

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Freud illustrates this principle in a dream sequence that is now famously recalled as the “Irma’s Injection” dream. 

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Faced with guilt over a failed treatment, the master scrambles for relief, turning the dream into a stage of scattered responsibility, where the attributive sense of blame is thinned out. Instead of confronting his guilt, the dream displaces it onto others and cloaks the anxiety of the dreamer in bizarre, medicalized imagery. The rest of the selection is an interesting read on their own:

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"My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: 'She has a dull area low down on the left.' He also indicated that a portion of the skin on her left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) ... M. said: 'There's no doubt it's an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated. ... We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamine (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) ... Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly ... And probably the syringe had not been clean." 

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Freud’s tone in the Irma sequence is characteristically affectless, and even faintly self-parodic. He narrates the dream with the clipped authority of a physician recording a clinical procedure, as if the dream were a specimen under examination. The dream logic, however, grows increasingly spurious the longer Freud recalls it: percussing through a bodice, noticing lesions through clothing, spontaneously diagnosing dysentery, and invoking chemical names that trail off into a breakdown.

 

It is clear that the disturbing content which he had been harboring has leaked out sideways, and is now manifesting in ways that are alien to the waking experience. 

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The monograph continues: “I reproach Irma for not having accepted the ‘solution.’ I say, ‘If you still have pains, it is really your own fault…’ I am startled at the idea that I may have overlooked some organic affection…If Irma's pains are indeed of organic origin, it is not my duty to cure them. My treatment, of course, removes only hysterical pains. It seems to me, in fact, that I wish to find an error in the diagnosis; for then I could not be reproached with failure to effect a cure.”

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Freud didn’t arrive at this dream by accident. Prior to this occurrence, he had received a pointed comment from Dr. Rie about a former patient, Anna, whose symptoms persisted after Freud had ended her treatment. Anna Hammerstein Lichteim, in fact, was the patient Irma. Rie’s remark was not deliberately hostile but it did hinted at Freud’s medical competencies: “She is better," he writes "...but not altogether well”— and this landed with the weight of professional reproach, especially given the presence of Anna’s influential relatives, who had already been doubting Freud’s unorthodox methods. Freud took Rie’s letter as a veiled accusation that he had promised too much but delivered too little. In his estimation, there was a foreboding sentiment that his peers might withdraw support from his practice. The sting of this criticism pushed him into a defensive position. 

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He would spend the evening drafting a justification of his treatment intended for Josef Breuer. This scene and the defending stance that forced itself upon Freud’s waking life, bled directly into the dream, where he no longer had to argue for his case in the open. 

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The strange detail of the dream became a protective disguise, and would forcefully open Freud's introduction to the wish-fulfillment thesis.

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Freud constantly repeated that the unconscious remained unaltered during sleep. It is the relation between the systems that changes, and not the material itself. A reorganization of access routes permits the ego’s sleep‑wish to dominate, allowing latent dream‑thoughts to bypass censorship and be expressed in disguised, manifest form.

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Later commentators have pointed to this theoretical restraint as symptomatic of a broader structural assumption of the dream: that while dreams are psychically productive formations, sleep only serves as the permissive condition for their emergence.

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This is not to say that Freud ignored the phenomenon of sleep in his career, nor did he relegate it to a passive antecedent of the dream event, since it is a voluntary occurrence that one wills to "lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin," and it is of one's volition that they choose to carry out sleep as if it were "...an entirely analogous undressing of their minds."

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Nevertheless, it is evident that he has little to no interest in vivisecting the event of the sleep. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he'd go on to write that "I have had little occasion to deal with the problem of sleep, for that is essentially a problem of physiology, even though one of the characteristics of the state of sleep must be that it brings about modifications of the conditions of functioning of the mental apparatus." 

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Consequently, the phenomenon of sleep would only be discussed by Freud in intermittent passings. The remainder of the book will concern itself entirely with the machinations of the dream and the mechanisms of dream-work operative in a dreaming sleep, leaving sleep itself largely untheorized beyond its role in modifying the system relations of mental life.

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Compared to the conceptual density that Freud invests in developing a theory of the dream, there is a relative silence in his reflections about sleep. In this way, his orientation reflects the historical difficulty of the West in grappling with sleep in a more substantive treatment.

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When sleep is invoked in an ambiguous manner, it is rarely sleep in its bare, unadorned form that is being discussed. More often, what is meant is the dreaming state, sleep as it plays host to the dream, and thus to narrative, imagery, experience, and not sleep, per se. 

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That is to say, it is commonly dealing with the mind in transit: the compromised threshold between waking and dream-life, and the state between voluntary thought and the automatic productions of wishes. What is taken up under the name of sleep in such cases is not the physiological condition itself but the fertile ground that provides cover for the distortions of fantasy, memory, fear, and desire—which means there is also little regard in delineating what is hallucinatory, from what is the dream, from the daydreaming into the mind-wandering occasion, or, in other words, when sleep is taken to stand in for any altered relation to consciousness, other experiences of the senses that distort one's alignment with the world are left unseparated, unmarked, absorbed into its ambiguity.

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Sleep is almost always filtered through its most reportable phase and it becomes synonymous with the content of dreams rather than with the condition of sleep itself. That is why, I think, it is necessary to foreground the distinction between dreaming sleep and the dreamless sleep if one were to even attempt to discuss the consequences of rupturing and breaking through it.

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What tends to pass for sleep in much of our habituated use, unless it is explicitly cited, is not sleep proper, but the dramatized version of it—the sleep that speaks, that remembers and stages fantastical worlds. There is a persistent slippage in its usage, and it is understandable to be suspicious of this tendency, as even in recent literary treatments, sleeps and dreams retain a quiet conflation, where the phenomenon of sleep is relativized into its narratable form, as if they were one and the same.

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Victoria Wohl observes that sleep consistently emerges as a philosophical blindspot in the Western intellectual tradition because unlike dreams, sleep cannot be fully illuminated by philosophical analysis. We cannot speak about its logos and therefore “....sleep appears [merely] as a dark after-image in the eternal daylight of reason.”[1] 

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It is a temporary metaphysical death altogether[2], and so it is reasonable that when we speak about its discursive character, we miss essentially what is the condition of discursivity in the first place. 

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Sleep frustrates our philosophical impulse to name, divide, and clarify because it does not provide a substantive object, event or personality that can be reconstituted in language. And “...if that turn from sleep to dreams has a legacy in Freud’s Traumdeutung, then returning to the sleep of the Greeks may allow us to ask what we post-Freudians lose by closing our eyes to sleep.” [3]

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Early documents on sleep remained largely physiological. If the Greeks invested any theological understanding towards sleep, it was probably to the benefit of elaborating Death. 

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The red‑figure of the Sarpedon Krater from 400 BCE illustrates this vividly, as we see how Hypnos (the personification of sleep) and Thanatos (his twin brother, Death) are explicitly entangled in the worldview of a Homeric Greek. 

Hypnos and Thanatos are depicted as pallbearers carrying the lifeless body of Sarpedon, the mortal son of Zeus who fell in battle during the Trojan War at the hands of Patroclus. Moments prior, they had been summoned by Hermes at Zeus’s command to retrieve the body from the battlefield and deliver it safely to Lycia, where he would be accorded the proper burial rites befitting a hero.

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The work of the psychopompos was the sole duty of Hermes. It is not unexpected, therefore, that there are unorthodox visual representations of this event, diverging from the textual source where Hermes is placed in an overseeing role alongside Hypnos and Thanatos.

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In the Sarpedon Krater, their figures are nude and winged, and positioned in a mirror arrangement that shows them holding either side of the corpse. Their musculature is idealized, and their gestures are controlled, conveying a stylized tenderness that resembles the poised elegance of soldiers in a funeral procession. In some depictions, such as the kylix attributed to Euphronios, the two are outfitted like hoplites—Hypnos with a sword and a circular shield, and Thanatos bearing both a spear and an archaic shield with a gorgoneion emblazoned at its center. Without the inscribed names, they might be mistaken for Sarpedon’s comrades rather than divine escorts sent by Zeus.

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An earlier image of the two exists in the sixth century BCE, carved into the cedarwood Chest of Kypselos. Hypnos and Thanatos are depicted in their infantile state with one shown sleeping, and the other similar in form but with a more darker complexion.   

Hesiod elaborated their lineage in this manner:

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“And Night (Nyx) bore Doom (Moros) and black Fate,

Death (Thanatos) and Sleep (Hypnos),

Wandering Arrows, Homicide, Strife,

And kindly Death and gentle Sleep, 

Twin brothers, who in the chill underworld 

Dwell and make men rest from their toil.”

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Before the Hippocratic corpus were gathered into a centralized medical doctrine, a prevailing cultural view treated Sleep as a social mirror of Death, offering humanity a controlled glimpse into the abyss that swallowed consciousness with nightly regularity.

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In its early conceptualization, the figure of Sleep and the state that bore its namesake occupies a place within the divine structure of the cosmos that aligns with the invisible traffic between different states of being. In some accounts, Hypnos joins with Pasithea, goddess of hallucination and relaxation, and fathers Morpheus, who appears in dreams under human semblance. The symbolic economy of Hypnos’ lineage—as a figure involved in the network of chthonic powers questioning and disrupting forms of human vulnerability—positions him within a cosmology where sleep involves a shift in the distribution of presence. This transformation centers on the departure or softening of the vital interior which shapes the body's condition as permeable and receptive.

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The sleeping body exists within a system of shared influence that are occupied by divine forces. The metaphors shaping this structure cast Sleep as a presence that descends, or fills the body, as seen in verbs such as katechō and hypnôi dêthen. These expressions treat Sleep as an agentive power that arrives and possesses the body. In the Homeric language, Sleep seizes the sleeper, at which point the psuchê lifts from the limbs. The body remains, stilled and without strain, as its animating principle traverses a parallel field. This movement generates conditions where visitation becomes possible and  figures from beyond the horizon of waking life are welcomed.

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In the scene where the spectral figure of Patroclus addresses the living, Hypnos seizes the body, causing the psuchê to depart from his limbs. "Sleep seized me," he exclaims, "...the psuchê flew from my body."

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Descriptions of sleep in earlier accounts rely on the gestures of loosening and dispersion. Sleep releases the limbs and alters sensation. This arrangement frames the sleeping body as something that is more permeable than its usual state. Without the full occupation of the interior force that animated it, the body adopts a posture of stillness and becomes receptive to external influence. 

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Analytical accounts emphasize this configuration as integral to the archaic understanding of Sleeping. Consciousness moves with the thumos (θυμός) and resides in the phrenes (φρένες), and during sleep, these locations move. The sleeper’s inert-ness is not a state of being empty but a phase in the circulation of soul-substances. That is why Bruno Snell argues that Homer lacks a unified concept of "body" vs. "soul." Instead of the hollowed out carcass that is familiar to the Christian imagination, the living person is a collection of limbs and organs (melea) that are animated by vital forces. When these forces depart in sleep (or death), what remains is simply the aggregate of lifeless limbs that no longer receive or return sensation.

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The poetic language treats the transformation of the waking body to sleep as a process: to sleep is to enter a condition where the self is temporarily relocated. The body retains form and name but receives no forces from within.

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Cultural rituals that surround the act of sleep respond to this condition by making the "porous" condition of the body salient. Warnings against sleeping in sacred enclosures emerge from the understanding that sleepers are visible to powers moving through the occupied space. Thus, funerary inscriptions and incubation rites make an especial notice that during sleep, the body’s boundaries soften and its interior structure invites visitation from supernatural forces. 

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Sleep easily appears as a herald of softness and care, because in the epic narratives which occupied the Greek imagination, his presence adjusted to the pace of fate and the quiet transitions that stabilized the limits of human exertion. This orientation may have shaped the foundation upon which Sleep would enter medical thought, that is, through the deepening participation of divine figures in the structures of cure and attention. 

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As we enter into the Philosophical age, the transformation of Hypnos' image reflects the gradual, curative medicalization of Sleep. We find that the figure Sleep became increasingly depicted alongside the healing god Asclepius in the iconography of temple medicine—particularly within the Asclepieia, where sleep, through the rite of incubation, became both a medium of divine communication and a therapeutic practice at the same time.

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A few centuries later, dream healing would be developed and slowly turned into a widespread practice in theurgic medicine. The dream incubation ritual, officially named the enkoimesis, would settle into a regular practice to invoke divine guidance and promote healing through the messages received during the induced slumber.

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Hippocrates would no later formalize the study of Sleep as an object of medical attention, classifying its disorders and linking its disturbances to the physical imbalance and environmental causes that affect it.

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Next week, I will explain how, in full how Aristotle, the theogonic framing would be overturned, and superceded by a model of sleep that is cardiocentric and saturated with a naturalist tendency. How sleep arises from the interior regulation of heat and vapor, and how it influences the flow of pneuma within the blood.

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The seizure of the heart’s perceptual clarity halts the transmission of sensory data. The eyes do not see  and voluntary actions recedes from the body. Sleep arrives through a carefully structured withdrawal of the faculties that preserves essential operations like digestion while removing the outward signs of animation. The vapor is obscured, shrouding the instrument of sensation in a kind of functional silence. In effect, Aristotle compares this to the choking of a fountain where the source remains intact, but its activity is somewhat paused under pressure.

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The pneuma, an interior breath carried within the blood, serves as the instrument of perception. When the passage of pneuma becomes blocked, the self turns inward. The heart loses access to the external world, but faint impressions still ripple. This stilled condition makes dreams available. For Aristotle, dreams are not divine messages nor supernatural interventions, but physiological afterimages that follow after residual movements echo through the nighttime. They appear as trembling traces in the blood, as though the still water of consciousness still bore the memory of the operations in the state of wakefulness.

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You will clearly observe that this is a very biological account. Sleep becomes an effect of vapor and internal pressure. Its arrival depends on physical causes that move through heat and digestion. The heart undergoes a process of cooling and recalibration, and the senses fall away because the mechanism through which they operate becomes too congested to be transmitted. 

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The philosophical muteness that surrounds sleep would produce a strange asymmetry whose influence is made apparent in the way we think about sleep today.

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While dreams were gathered into cosmologies and poetics in the Greek mythos, sleep would be incorporated to the literature of physiology and biology. 

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In this way, the historical treatment of sleep reflects the West’s privileging of what can be reported over that which eludes linguistic articulation.

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Indeed, if it is not explicitly expressed, there is a pervading suspicion that the historical treatment of the West conflates sleep with dreams entirely, as if the only substantive distinction is the dichotomy between wakefulness and dreaming sleep. The dreamless sleep, by contrast, is a forgotten interval bracketed by one’s memory.

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The conviction is that only what enters representation, and what can be recalled, described, or made legible, has epistemic exchange value. The dream, unlike sleep, retained a substantive, if only conceptually rich, order of signs that could be interpreted and hence put into linguistic investigation. While sleep eludes representation, the dream offered a transparent scenery: the dreamer thinks, sees, judges, and reacts, and is reciprocally engaged in a world that mimics reality just enough to be mistaken for it. 

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