29 June

None of the research on sleep can answer one basic question - why we do it . At the end of this article the researcher suggests something he thinks is crazy, but I reckon finally on the right track: "...sleep is so beneficial that the question is really why animals ever bother to wake up. Maybe it is actually the harmful state of wakefulness that is an evolutionary mystery, not sleep....What about this hypothesis: sleep was the first state of life and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged?" Sleep and death are equivalent, we die every night. But death is not the opposite of life, just as unconsciousness isn't the opposite of consciousness. We're conscious when we're asleep, it's just a different state of consciousness. Similarly when we die we live a permanent dream state, again it's just a different state of consciousness. We can't understand sleep because we keep opposing consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, the temporal and the eternal. Binaries blind us, in everything.