Dreamless Sleep and the Whole of Human Life: An Ontological Exposition

Author(s): Corey Anton

Source: Human Studies , Apr., 2006, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 181-202
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27642746

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Human Studies (2006) 29: 181-202 ? Springer 2006
DOI 10.1007/s 10746-006-9018-5

Dreamless Sleep and the Whole of Human Life: An Ontological

Exposition

COREY ANTON
Grand Valley State University, 266 LSH, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401-9403,
USA
(E-mail: antonc@gvsu.edu)

Abstract. This paper explores the meaning of dreamless sleep. First, I consider fo
reasons why we commonly pass over sleep's ontological significance. Second, I compa
and contrast death and sleep to show how each is oriented to questions regarding th
possibilities of "being-a-whole." In the third and final part, I explore the meaning
implications of "being-toward-sleep," arguing that human existence emerges atop
naturally anonymous corporeality (i.e. living being). In sum, I try to show that we c
recover an authentic ? if somewhat ambiguous sense of "being-a-whole" only
recognizing the ontological significance of dreamless sleep.

Key words: Sleep, death, "being-a-whole", authenticity, ontology, existence

It is... Aristotle's nutritive life that marks out the obscure bac
ground from which the life of higher animals gets separated
(Giorgio Agamben, The Open, 14).

Twilight is intimate because here nature veils the boundaries se

rating things from one another as well as the distances that divid
us from them. (Erwin Straus, Phenomenological Psychology, 19).

Life must be understood as a kind of Being to which there belong

a Being-in-the-world (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 290).

The Neglected Significance of Dreamless Sleep1

How are we to understand the whole of our being when part of o

existence opens to that which has never been present for us but which we
are? We all spend a great part of our lives in the vegetative state
dreamless sleep but because we can reduce ourselves to our awak
existences, we easily deny the ambiguity of the whole of who we are.
Sharma (2001) writes, "Sleep would not pose the kind of problem it do
if we were not, besides other things, sleeping beings. It also would no

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 182 C. ANTON

pose much of a problem if we were not waking beings too. It poses a

problem precisely because we are both" (1). The bulk of the problem is
that we tend to think of ourselves as primarily or even exclusively
conscious, thinking beings (i.e. awake beings) who admittedly do some
times "need to get some sleep." Such an awakist bias fails to grasp the
degree to which we are sleeping beings for whom awakeness is a periodic
achievement. Such a bias also fails to grasp how dreamless sleep is a
complement and corrective to the generally accepted idea that death
serves as sufficient grounding for disclosing a person's "being-a-whole."
Only by adequate exposition of dreamless sleep, I argue, can we recover
an authentic - even if ambiguous - sense of the whole of our being.

Why Dreamless Sleep is Mostly Neglected

How can we all share in the recurrent state of sleep but fail to register it as
a statement about the whole of who we are? To clear the way for later
discussion, I examine four main reasons why we commonly neglect the
significance of sleep.
First, sleep is for the most part leveled-down to what anyone has to say
about it; it is considered within the average intelligibility of the "they
self." As applying equally to everyone and therefore to nobody in par
ticular, it seems to be an insignificant fact with no ontological import.
Nevertheless, sleep is not outright neglected in everyday talk. It is, on the
contrary, assumed within the notions of "yesterday" and "tomorrow."
Attending to either end of this double horizon, our everyday talk
presupposes sleep while seamlessly stitching over its occurrence. For
example, using the words "yesterday" or "tomorrow," we can weave a
sense of continuity across days without mentioning sleep as significant in
its own regard. On the other hand, sleep enters explicit or thematic
consideration when someone is having difficulties getting some. Insomnia,
sleeplessness, restless tossing and turning, desiring "a good night's rest,"
polite inquiries such as "how did you sleep?" - this is how sleep often
enters everyday concernful awareness. Such ready-made interpretations
of sleep offer a means of reckoning with it, but one that is leveled down to
inauthentic encounters.
The ontological significance of sleep, its relevance to the meaning of
being-a-whole, does not usually appear on the horizon of common-sense,
meaning that a question such as, "What does sleep mean for the whole
of who we are?" seems basically misguided. But it is not that common
sense is without a ready response: "We are the same persons as when
we are awake, though for the time we are asleep." Scientific accounts

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 183

of physiological nourishment and other biological processes may

predominate our understanding and seem to provide sufficient response,
and yet, such objective orientations, though certainly not invalid in their
own terms, offer anything but an adequate understanding of the onto
logical import of our own-most dreamless sleep.
Second, sleep remains passed-over because Western scholarly thought
tends to reduce sleep to the experience of dreaming." Dreams are fasci
nating, mysteriously engaging, and often vivid, and, if we try to compare
our dreams to the sheer fact of dreamless sleep, the contrast is somewhat
impossible, as dreamless sleep offers nothing to compare. A more apt
description would be that dreamless sleep is the absence of any and every
experiential content (awake, dreaming, or otherwise). It may help to recall
that Ren? Descartes' skepticism was funded largely by dream analogies,
his point being that we can be fooled in waking life just as dreams can fool
us. But, it must be underscored, we cannot be deceived while we
dreamlessly sleep, for, experientially, there is nothing to be deceived
about.
Martin Heidegger writes little about sleep, but he does make a
statement that nicely illustrates how dreamless sleep can hide itself as
we go from awake to dreaming to awake again. In his 1928 lectures on
"world," Heidegger (1984) elucidates the early Greek origins of the
term and includes a reference to a fragment from Heraclitus which he
interprets as:

A single and common world belongs to the awake, but each of the
sleeping turns to his own world. Here world is related to being
awake and sleeping, as basic modes proper to factical Dasein.
Awakeness is a condition of Dasein in which beings manifest them
selves for everyone as one and the same within the same world
character; beings manifest themselves in a thorough-going harmony
accessible to everyone and binding for everyone. In sleep, on the
contrary, self-manifesting beings have their own peculiar world
character for the individual, in each case a completely different way
in which they world. (172)

This account bypasses dreamless sleep entirely, and in its place,

attention divides between publicly awake Dasein and individually
dreaming Dasein.3 Admittedly, this makes some sense: The wide-awake
world, social conventions and locally grown meaning systems (i.e.
concerns of wide varieties and even dreams), push from awareness the
mind-blowing non-existence that we are day after day. And, because we
don't consciously endure our dreamless sleep, a period spanning several
hours can seem to take but an instant. This leads directly to my next
point.

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 184 C. ANTON

Third, endemic to human life are natural and recurrent aporia.4 There
are perplexing lapses, gaps, and discontinuities of wide-varieties. Sleep is
one of the most pronounced. Drew Leder, a phenomenologist who has
taken considerable note of sleep, addresses how it is one of the body's
modes of "depth disappearance":

The body is no longer ecstatic, that from which I perceive and act,
but a being recessed from my command and awareness. As I no
longer perceive from this body, neither can I perceive to it...My own
sleeping body is one thing I will never directly see. Where 'it' is, T,'
as conscious, perceiving subject, necessarily am not. (1990, 58)

Because sleep is such a radical aporia someone might want to challenge

any use of the expression "the phenomenon of sleep." A critic might
suggest that this makes a kind of category mistake because sleep is pre
cisely the absence of all phenomena whatsoever. As we are asleep all lines
dividing body and world as well as self and body evaporate. Distances
collapse, and problems, difficulties, and worries disappear. AH is enfolded
into the grand and effortless depth disappearance. But, "I" am not absent
as if remembered - as if my very disappearance would denote what it is an
absence of. All is gone. But "gone" isn't wholly accurate either, for
something can be gone only from a somewhere that doesn't likewise
vanish. The dense thickness, the oneness of all-to-all-in-sleep, means that
no persons are there to haggle over the best expression for this aporia.
One of the main reasons that dreamless sleep bypasses everyday concern,
therefore, is because it is, from within itself, the hither side of existence.
Fourth and finally, we obviously need sleep and everyone loves a good
night of it. Nevertheless, the meaning of dreamless sleep can remain
obfuscated by the myth of autonomy and/or the self-sufficient individual.
Because we often define a self or a person by strict alignment with self
consciousness or self-awareness, both forms of awakeness, the meaning of
dreamless sleep may be taken as threatening. As Sharma suggests, "There
is no doubt that if our identity consists of the continuity of our self
consciousness, then the fear, including the theoretical fear of its (seeming)
regular disruption in the form of sleep is very real" (2001, 11). Thus, if
people are committed to the belief in an autonomous individual and to
the continuity of consciousness as constituting the whole of a person's life,
they may try to avoid the thought that we all regularly suffer radical
disruptions, gaps and erasures.
Circumscribing the whole of our lives to moments of awakeness (or
even of dreaming) provides a comfortable reduction; it is part of the myth
of powerfulness that people like to believe about themselves. Where
Ernest Becker (1973) writes of repressed death denial, we could similarly

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 185

consider the repressed denial of dreamless sleep. The vested interest

people have in denying the meaning of their sleep basically comes from a
preference for a certain kind of wholeness. If we believe that who we are
in our awake lives is the whole of who we are, we thereby can imagine that
we are in full possession of ourselves. But, as I will try to show, we do not
yet have an adequate definition of wholeness.

On Sleep's Non-Existence

The ontological significance of sleep remains mostly passed-over; its

bearing upon the whole of human life is under-appreciated or even
repressed. This should not be too surprising, given the non-existence that
sleep is. But, what is needed at this point is better clarification of such
"living non-existence."
The word "existence" is commonly equated with "being" in general.
But finer distinctions are required, for the English word "being" ambig
uously signifies at least three different "modes of being." That is, when we
use the word "is" any entity referred to remains unspecified in its mode of
being. To deal with this ambiguity we can take recourse to Heidegger's
distinctions of "extants," "lives," and "exists." In The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic, Heidegger suggests, first, that the word "extant"
signifies the being of things, objects, and other material (non-living)
entities. Beings termed "extant" were not born and will not suffer
biological cessation; as pure materiality extending in space and having
neither interiority nor any worldy cares, extants are, although they neither
"live" nor do they "exist." Strictly speaking they are in time. Second,
animals and biological organisms are said to be more than extant; their
being is characterized by life. They have biological beginnings and will
suffer biological cessation, and as fundamentally locomotive, they are
able to sense and feel. They manage outwardly directed desires and are
subject to experiences of distance. Entities that "live" are not merely
inorganic things in time but are biological processes of time. Third and
finally, "existence" refers to beings whose mode of being is "being-in-the
world." Only humans, suggests Heidegger, are in the mode of existence,
and hence the word "existence" refers to the characteristic mode of being
for humanity. Beings who exist, humans, are time as ecstatical tempo
rality. As a good deal of this paper trades upon his notion of "existence,"
I quote Heidegger at length:

Existence is the term for the sort of being we ourselves are, human
Dasein. A cat does not exist, but it lives; a stone neither lives nor

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186 C. ANTON

exists but is present before us [vorhanden]. Among other things,

being-already-by-things belongs to existence. This is to be taken in
the sense that Dasein, as existent, exists by way of this being-by
things, and is disclosed in and for being-by-things. Being-by is not
being alongside, next to something, as a bench stands next to one's
house. A bench does not exist; it has no proper 'being by the
house,' for that would mean that the house would appear and man
ifest itself to the bench as a house. (1984, 127)

Heidegger distinguishes the word "existence" by claiming that humans

are in the mode of "being-already-by-things." But this account is not that
helpful in addressing the relationship between humans and their own
most dreamless sleep. Can Dasein, as being-in-the-world, be its sleep? Is
not sleep the very epitome of non-Dasein, the non-being-in-the-world that
every one of us isl Taking Heidegger's distinctions of 'extants,' 'lives,' and
'exists' as a framework, it would seem more appropriate to argue that
humans live but do not exist (Dasein, verb) while they sleep.
We now may be in position to get at the difference between the whole
of existence and the whole of the life of which we are a part as well as to
explore how the whole of life enters into existence.

Death and Sleep: on Kinds of Wholeness

For Martin Heidegger, the problematic of "being-a-whole" first appears

in Division Two of his Being and Time. Division One had yet to address
two main difficulties that emerged along the way, first regarding the
individuation of Dasein and second regarding Dasein's possibility of
authentically being-a-whole. Heidegger had yet to reveal how, although
each and every person is equally being-in-the-world, any one person's
own-most possibilities could be authentically disclosed and resolutely
attested to. Division Two sought to accomplish this task by securing the
sense of being-a-whole, appealing, ultimately, to the phenomenon of my
own-most death.5 For the early Heidegger, death is the principle of
individuation that attempts to secure an authentic (i.e. ontological)
grounding for the wholeness of existence.
By death, Heidegger does not mean factical perishing at the death-bed,
the day and hour of biological cessation, but rather "being-toward
death." As Heidegger suggests, "The 'ending' which we have in view
when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein's Being-at-an-end
[Zu-Ende-sein], but a Being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende] of this
entity" (1962, 289). His point is that hurnans exist as being-ahead -
of-themselves. In authentic being-toward-death, given that existence

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 187

remains fundamentally characterized by a "not-yet" that is still out

standing, we open to the possibility of authentically reckoning with fini
tude. Further characterizing this possibility, Heidegger writes:

When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one's own death, one
is liberated from one's lostness in those possibilities which may
accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in
such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand
and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that
possibility which is not to be outstripped. (1962, 308)

Being-toward-death not only individuates Dasein from the they-self, it

also offers to existence the authentic possibility of being-a-whole. This
"anticipatory resoluteness" is an ontological possibility, one which
emerges only because humans run ahead of themselves and can stand
ready in the angst of their own finitude. Death, per se, holds nothing that
Dasein can be; it is not so much a possible experience of Dasein's future as
it is that ultimate possibility from which I can resolutely reckon with
concrete choices in my existence. Fair enough.
But we still may need an adequate definition of wholeness, especially if
we are to include address to the phenomenon of sleep. What, exactly, do
we mean by the whole human being? We can start with what we do not
mean. As a whole, I am more than the space taken up by my mass. The
whole of a person is not to be likened to the whole of an object, as if the
whole of a person were equal to the volume of water that would be
displaced should that person be submerged. Moreover, the whole of me is
not merely the accumulation of my experiences, nor the summation of the
immediately present visible world, including all the objects that are
identified with me (e.g. my properties). We might be tempted to think of
wholeness in terms of the entire life-span, integrating all experiences from
cradle to grave and taking the sum (or perhaps "being-toward-the-sum")
to be a kind of whole. Without denying the sense of these kinds of
wholeness, I am suggesting that there is an even more radical notion, an
all-inclusiveness achieved by an ecstatical retention and recollection of
having-been in total undifferentiation. It is here, precisely, that we can find
an entirely different sense of the whole that we are.
I argue that Heidegger's exposition of death and Dasein's possibilities
of being-a-whole needs to be complemented with a consideration of the
authentic possibilities of being-toward-sleep.6 If we died but never slept,
then perhaps Heidegger's appeal to death would be sufficient for an
account of wholeness.7 The problem, already suggested, is securing an
ontologically adequate definition of wholeness. Whereas Death discloses
the whole of my existence, sleep discloses the whole of the life of which I,

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 188 C. ANTON

as existing, am a part. My factical death is the end of the life of my body,

not merely the no-longer-being-there of Dasein (i.e. existence).9 The
question becomes: who must we be as a whole if our awake lives include
an understanding of our living roots in non-existence? I now compare and
contrast sleep with death to underscore the different sense of wholeness
that each makes possible.

Recurrence of Sleep

Death and sleep initially display some rather obvious commonalties.

Death often is cast as a kind of sleep.10 Moreover, the word "kill" is
sometimes replaced by the euphemism "put to sleep." Also, sleep is allied
to death when common-sense offers it as the preferred state for factical
death: "the best way to die is in your sleep." These alignments make
sense, as the transition from sleep to death is often presumed to be an easy
one, perhaps unnoticed. But such everyday language should not reduce
the present exposition of sleep to an ontic event merely present-at-hand
(the sleep of a sleeper in bed). Just as people can reckon with their own
death, they can understand that part of their being is other than "being
in-the-world." Sleep is the re-occurring other side of Dasein (existence,
awake or dreaming), for the dead cannot come back to life whereas the
living wake-up daily.
Death is not to be understood as a single future event as much as
an omni-present condition. Hans Jonas illustrates this point in a way
that affords parallels to sleep. Jonas writes, "Two meanings merge in
the term mortal: that the creature so called can die, is exposed to the
constant possibility of death; and that, eventually, it must die, is
destined for the ultimate necessity of death" (1966, 87). Here, it is the
latter which makes the former possible. It is also the latter which most
clearly reveals how death is a condition rather than merely an event
that will occur at some future date. Dreamless sleep is similar to death
in that it too is a continued condition. But in significant contrast to
death, sleep is the re-occurring experience of having-been undifferenti
ated. Death, said otherwise, is never something I bodily emerge from',
the resurrection of sleepers is the difference between death and sleep.
But such a statement is imprecise, for sleep is not death. The loss of
life at death is not at all the non-existence of the living during their
sleep. In the demise of the body (i.e. death) we lose all that was ours
uniquely, but in sleep we are able to lose hold of ourselves only to be
incorporated into that whole which is more encompassing than any
whole within existence. We furthermore have the capacity to bring that

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 189

wholeness of sleep back into our awake lives, disclosing the whole of
who we are as partly undifferentiated.

Being- To ward- Sleep

All living creatures perish but apparently only humans know of and
meaningfully consider their own death. Likewise, all living creatures sleep
and yet seemingly, only humans know of and appreciate the meaning of
their own-most sleep. To the degree that other organisms have no
knowledge of their own death, they are innocent of existential individu
aron and need not understand sleep's meaning. Only beings who can
reckon with their own mortality would be able to benefit from inter
preting the meaning of dreamless sleep.
"In deep sleep," Leder writes, "we disco ver...radical anonymity..."
(1990, 59). All of us are indistinguishable while we sleep; the who of you
as you are asleep is the same as the who of me as I am sleeping, and in this
regard we all are partly one. Part of who we are is that who who is
without distances, lacks, or properties. To be asleep is to be without
separations between race, sex, creed, or nation. The when and where of
sleep is without history or territory: who we are while we sleep is identical
to the who the ancients were when they slept. To fall asleep is therefore to
let the body recess back to that impersonal who who is universally
common to life (even non-Dasein beings). Is it not liberating as well as
comforting to understand that, as alive, awakeness is always already less
than the whole of our being?
We emerge from sleep only temporarily to ecstatical existence, for "I
can surface for only a limited time before requiring resubmergence in the
impersonal" (Leder, 1990, 59). When moving about in daily concerns, co
comported with others and tending over various projects and dealings
(i.e. when wide awake), we can grasp that being-in-the-world routinely
closes-up, collapses, and undergoes radical and full erasure. What would
social encounters be like if everyone understood - fully accepted and
celebrated - that we are undifferentiated while asleep, that in sleep we
genuinely, as Leder (1990) suggests, "form one body"?
Being-toward-sleep is the mode of existence that accepts that we are
much more than our awake lives might lead us to believe. It moves out
from the recognition that the living are all partly one, and each of us in
our awakeness can encounter others and acknowledge them as equally
sharing in the universal condition of sleep. Existence is thus enmeshed
and suspended in anonymous corporeality, and sleep discloses how, just
as Dasein is its world existingly, the lived-body is its earthly ground

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 190 C. ANTON

livingly. As death individuates Dasein out from the they-self to an

authentic encounter with the whole of existence, dreamless sleep thor
oughly unifies the lived-body with all other living bodies in their universal
ground: "Earth."11

Dreamless Sleep and the Whole of Human Life

Routinely recessed to non-existence, we each day emerge into a thrown

awakening and begin again the projects of existence. Can we fully grasp
the meaning of the fact that every day all persons recede from the world
and relinquish their cares?

Sleep as a Call of Conscience

As hopelessly trite as it first sounds, let's re-consider the old saw: "A tree
falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it. Does it make a sound?"
Those who claim that such trees do make a sound usually do so for
"objectivist" or "realist" reasons. Arguing that there is a fact of the
matter regardless of our experiences of that fact, these accounts often
neglect the role played by imagination. That is, if we're first going to
imagine forests and then also imagine a falling tree therein, then, why
wouldn't we further imagine that this falling tree makes sounds? The
unheard-though-sounding-as-they-fall trees presumably do so without
anticipation or recollection. As worldless, they are innocent of their
indifference to such occurrences. How, though, might we elucidate that
contentless state of worldlessness and I-lessness which bears upon the
whole of our being? Whereas the unheard sounds are experienceable in
principle, our own-most sleep remains forever outside the possibilities of
direct present experience. Nonetheless dreamless sleep can enter into
wide-awake concerns. Might the soundings of unheard trees (both nearer
and farther than our own-most sleep) provide a homing beacon for get
ting back to the truth about the whole of who we are?
This digression into forests and trees brings up another matter, "the
natural." People often think of nature as wilderness absent of human life;
they commonly take "the natural" as the planet earth independent of
people. In struggling to relate humanity with nature, people can assume
that humans are not the world. Fair enough, but they are not not it either.
When we imagine that humans are one kind of thing and nature is
something else, fictional lines of difference can appear as already given
gulfs. We de-naturalize and misunderstand humanity as we de-humanize

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 191

and misunderstand nature. In either case, we attempt to grasp less than

the whole as it actually is. In thinking of nature and the natural this way
(grasping less than the whole of nature and assuming that humans are
other than natural), we cover over a great clue regarding the whole of who
we are. The natural, I have tried to suggest, can best be grasped by
examining not nature independent of humans, but rather, by disclosing
the ontological significance of dreamless sleep.

Sleep as Clue to Our Shared Yet Own-Most Non-Existence

Obviously, we cannot get any closer to others' dreamless sleep by lying

down next to them, as if sleeping near them or sleeping when they do will
enable a shared experience. We universally share in sleep despite the fact
that everyone sleeps at different places and at different times. At first pass
this may seem to be an untenable position for, as Sharma (2001) points
out, "Sleep...like every other experience (or state) is someone's sleep" (4),
to which he further adds, "no one and the same - numerically same -
experience can belong to more than one self (7). Indeed, how can a state
be shared universally (i.e. be identical) if all experience is someone's
experience? To whom exactly does sleep "belong" if, as I am suggesting, it
is universally shared?
My response begins by stressing that although it is only particular
individuals who sleep, and even though no one can sleep for someone else,
and despite that fact that "on waking one does not have to turn around to
see who it was who slept and slept happily" (Sharma, 2001, 4), it is only
the awake who are able to identify the particular individuals who cur
rently are sleeping. Erwin Straus is suggestive on this point:

the sleeper...has, in fact not withdrawn his interest from the world;
rather, in lying down and sleeping he gives himself completely to
the world. Thus, he can no longer freely relate to the world and
therefore no longer delimit and claim that which is his own...Only
in waking life can the...experience of 'mine' be constituted. The
Mine differentiates itself from the not mine in its relation to that
which opposes;-opposes within the continuity of the relation l-other
realized in my mobility (1963, 284-285).

I return to the issue of "mobility" in the next section. Here I focus

attention on the fact that my own-most sleep is never "mine" as a present
state.
If we take the two statements "I have slept" and "I will fall asleep
again"12 and compare them to the statement: "I am sleeping," we find

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 192 C. ANTON

that this last one makes little sense, for sleep is the place and moment of
no distinctions, the emptiness where "I" am not. Only others could tell me
that I currently am sleeping, but this too makes no sense, for others
cannot convey the message, "you are asleep" short of waking me to tell
me. Straus nicely captures the complexity of the daily erasure of self
differentiation: "Awake, I say 'Last night I slept well.'... I, the speaker, I
who am now awake, have slept. But I have not slept as someone who is
awake. I notice, rather, that my life extends through the zone of sleep..."
(1963, 280). Consider, for further illustration, the everyday expression, "I
need to get some sleep." The notion of "getting some sleep" makes it
seem as if sleep were a substance that can be obtained, perhaps something
that I can store up for limited amounts of time. But in fact there is no "I"
who obtains the sleep; sleep is the very state of being radically I-less.
Dreamless sleep cannot be a present content of my consciousness - it is
never something that I am presently conscious of- and in that sense, sleep
is our own-most without ever being presently mine. This point can be
drawn out from Johnstone's (1976) argument regarding sleep as the gap in
experience that makes evident the meaning of consciousness. He writes,
"Now a gap has both a beginning and an end...The amnesiac, at least in
an ideal case, can acknowledge no gap in his experience, because he is
unaware of any previous experience. He is in no better a position than the
nonsleeper to learn the meaning of 'consciousness'" (1976, 225). We can
agree with Johnstone on this point, and take it to further imply that the
experience of sleep does not actually become mine until I wake up, and
then, de facto, it is always already past experience. The gap as gap can be
noted only after the gap's end, and if the gap were without an end it
wouldn't even be a gap. So too, my sleep is not yet mine until I wake up;
conversely, it seems to always already be mine only because my existence
always already assumes that I have woken up.
The phenomenological perplexities here can be clarified by reviewing
two commonly noted modes of intentionality. First is what Sartre (1956)
calls "pre-thetic intentionality" or "non-positional self-consciousness."
This is similar to what Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls "operative intention
ality." In both accounts, the intentional processes themselves are not
explicitly noted and there is no "I" posited in addition to experience. Such
prereflective ("I-less") experience can be contrasted with what Sartre calls
"thetic intentionality" or "positional self-consciousness," or what
Merleau-Ponty, drawing from Husserl, speaks of as "judgment" or
"intentionality of Act." This mode of intentionality, as reflective and
thematic, explicitly posits as "I" in accompaniment to experience. Two
further clarifications must be made here. First, the notion of pre-thetic
or operative intentionality, though not positing an "I" in addition to

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 193

experience, does not deny the "mineness" of any present experience; this
is partly why Sartre speaks of both non-positional and positional con
sciousness as "self-consciousness."13 Second, both Sartre and Merleau
Ponty (Heidegger too for that matter) maintain a primacy to pre-thetic
modes and yet acknowledge that reflection naturally emerges out from
and returns back to prereflective absorption. This is accomplished by a
constitutive temporality comprised of longitudinal or transversal (i.e.
ecstatic) intentionalities that underlie our prereflective experience.14 Pre
thetic intentionality, though not positing an "I," is admittedly coagulated
with historical density and personal habits. My history and habits, my
accumulated bodily capacities of "I can do it again," become part of the
prereflective background practices that perpetuate themselves in a host of
"ego-less" ways.
Now, if "...prereflective experience can never be severed from the
continuing contribution of past reflected experience" (Schr?g, 1969, 47),
then sleep, it becomes immediately apparent, is not merely a form of pre
thetic experience. In fact, because dreamless sleep stands in such contrast
to both prereflective (i.e. operative) and reflective (i.e. thetic) intention
ality, we need to explore the possibility of a different mode of con
sciousness - one which is not "self-consciousness" and which underlies
both thetic and pre-theic intentionalities. Admittedly this terminology is
difficult but dreamless sleep does seem to reveal a mode of conscious
ness.15 But even here sleep does not comprise the whole such conscious
ness. Rather, it serves as the daily reminder, the necessary clue to the
discovery, of precisely this mode of universally shared non-thetic, non
ecstatic consciousness.
On it own terms, sleep is non-ecstatical through and through and is not
open to reflection or temporal tenses and the like; it is radically I-less and
passes without ever being a present. But, this does not matter. Why not?
Because we always wake up; it is because I always wake up that I expe
rience by retentional awareness the fact that / have slept. In roughly
outlining "the phenomenology of waking up," Ian Kesarcodi-Watson
writes,

I am aware of there being an T who existed before I fell asleep, and

who's the same as the T I'm now aware of being...For what I mean
by 'waking up' is the re-emergence into consciousness a being who's
aware of being the same being who once fell asleep. This is not a
matter of remembering, but of awareness of a certain kind. To say I
know I've woken up is to say I know /Ve woken up (1981, 268).

Awake existence has an ecstatical character, meaning that retentions and

protentions penetrate and intermingle with present awareness and this

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 194 C. ANTON

accounts for my experienced continuity; we wake up already partly

connected to who we were before we fell asleep. Sleep, though we never
experience it as a present, is included within each and everyone's past
experience. But it is not a past experience that is remembered as a
particular content, as if suddenly remembering a dream that had been
forgotten. It is rather the fact that we wake up, feel well rested, and now
carry the sense o? having been absolutely undifferentiated. Moreover, past
sleep is always inseparable from the fibers of intentional existence; we
commonly feel ourselves as well rested or as growing tired.
In summary: existence is always ecstatic, meaning that to be awake is
to be in a situation that has both retentions and protentions. Even though
sleep, as non-thetic and non-ecstatic, is never a present experience, we
simply can agree with Johnstone where he argues that, "...we don't need
to be awake as spectators of our own sleep. It is sufficient that we are
awake after our period of sleep" (1976, 219). Rather than seek that
"when" which never has been a present for anyone, that "where" that is
without distances or location, we find that dreamless sleep meaningfully
enters existence in less than direct or immediate ways. Although it has
never been a present experience for anyone, dreamless sleep is precisely
that originary and peculiar past experience of which and in which every
person always already shares.

The Living Roots of Authentic Existence

If authentic being-toward-death dwells in angst, authentic being-toward

sleep opens humanity to the abiding joy of a more inclusive ground of
being. It takes courage to endure the angst of authentically reckoning
with death, but we take blissful comfort when we understand that, as
alive, existence is always already less than the whole of who we are. To
fall asleep is to give up momentarily on the individuated project of res
olute existence; it is to let all cares fall to oblivion.

At the very moment when I live in the world, when I am given over
to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, I can close
my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose
myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anony
mous life which subtends my personal one (Merleau-Ponty, 1962,
164-165).

Awakeness, with all its degrees of individuation, is only part of the whole
of life; we are beings who, on a daily basis, just as equally recess into the
radically anonymous and impersonal.

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 195

"Nightly," Leder states, "I give my life over to those vegetative pro
cesses that form but a circumscribed region of my day-body. Surface
functions all but abandoned, I become a creature of depth, lost in
respiration, digestion, and circulation" (1990, 59). Dreamless sleep is,
indeed, the nearest that the living come to being no more than the
nutritive processes of the vegetative. But we are not merely vegetative at
night. We are always partly at the level of these modes of organic and
impersonal consciousness. Sleep is the explicit daily reminder of - the
existential clue to - our roots in this ontological ground.
If, as Hans Jonas argues, "three characteristics distinguish animal
from plant life: motility, perception, emotion" (Jonas, 1966, 99), then,
when the living go to sleep they mimic and engage in what distantly
resembles plant behavior. By Straus's account too, it is the lack of
extensive motility in sleep that is part and parcel of the collapse of the
world and of mineness (cf. 1963, 233-236). Wholly without locomotive
capacities, the vegetative has no abstract distant desires, is without the
ability to perceive, and is void of conscious feeling.16 Hence, our earthly
ground is made plain if we recognize how living bodies daily approximate
the blind, near motionless, and silent posture of plant life. "Plants,"
Ernest Becker writes, "have been called poetically and probably truly
sleeping animals" (2005, 230). This point can be drawn out from Jonas's
observation that "Motile existence is fitful and anxious: plant life is
nothing of the kind...Ultimately it is the fact of individuation which de
cides the issue between animal and plant" (1966, 105). To understand the
meaning of dreamless sleep is to grasp first that people emerge out of an
earthly ground, and second, that individuation is a temporary and limited
part of the whole who we are. Although we never literally become plants,
lived-bodies always have sleep as both a condition and basic modality;
evolutionarily speaking, we were unable to completely leave behind the
radical anonymity of vegetative life.

Social Asymmetry and Vulnerability

We are able to encounter others as they are sleeping even though this
possibility is not routinely taken up. One of the main reasons why is
because, as Leder suggests, "In order to fall asleep I sever my social and
perceptual involvements, generally retreating to a dark and quiet space.
As a result, most of the world has only seen my body when awake" (1990,
58). Indeed, to prepare for sleep is to construct a sanctuary. But most of
the world encounters only the awake body not merely because we sever
social and perceptual involvements in order to fall asleep, but also

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 196 C. ANTON

because sleep renders us absolutely vulnerable. Whereas the dead are past
all vulnerabilities, the living can be no more vulnerable than when they
sleep. Accordingly, people lock doors, secure dwellings, maybe even set
up guards. They abstractly know that their bodies will still be "there" in a
physical public space. We, the awake on the other hand, may be entrusted
with the task of quieting sounds and standing watch over those who
currently sleep.17
Day after day we fall asleep and as we sleep we are but an entity for
others to encounter in a public world. In this regard, the sharing of our
own-most dreamless sleep holds an existential asymmetry: "The relation
of sleepers to one another is reciprocally negative, that of those who are
awake reciprocally positive. However, the relation of those who sleep to
those who are awake is unilaterally negative or unilaterally positive. The
sleeper cannot relate to one who is awake, but the converse is possible"
(Straus, 1963, 288). Because of this fundamental fact - our asymmetric
vulnerability in sleep - the act of falling asleep beside another person is
itself more than an act of intimacy. To close one's eyes and sleep next to
someone is to give a genuine demonstration of trust. And furthermore, to
awake to find an intimate nestled near is to receive existential confirma
tion of our mutual bond of faith.

Concluding Remarks

The grounded, the vegetative, the anything but autonomous and inde
pendent, this is the ambiguous part of the truth from which we routinely
try to hide.18 Sleep reveals us in our frailty and dependence, and it directly
confronts the one-sided hubris of existence. Any presumption to contin
uous self-conscious individuation is openly discredited, revealed for the
false pretense that it is.
The denial of sleep could be enlisted as part of what Becker (1975)
identified as the "modern causa sui project." Causa sui traditionally
means to not depend upon another; it refers to that which is fully and
completely the cause of itself. Consider too that Becker already had read
Friedrich Nietzsche and was likely familiar with Nietzsche's observation
that:

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived
so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extrava
gant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and
frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for freedom of the
will in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway,
unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 197

the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and
to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves
nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than
M?nchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up and into existence by
the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. (Nietzsche, 1968, 218)

The anticipatory resoluteness that is made possible by reckoning with our

own-most death should be tempered by the joyful hope that comes from
understanding the meaning of our dreamless sleep. We too often and too
eagerly cover over and hide from our utter dependency upon that mys
terious whole of which awake existence is only a part. Sleep is the eternal
reminder of how even something as basic as parturition is regarded and
made sense of only by the awake.
Every whole (that stands apart) is also a part within a larger whole
(cf. Koestler, 1967). But we primarily think of parts and wholes in awakist
terms. A critic, coming from an awakist bias, might therefore argue that I
am making an error: you cannot claim a person is a whole, also claim that
a person is part of a larger whole, and then further claim that the person
also is the whole of that whole of which the person is a part. And yet it is
possible to make these claims. What is continuous across the states of
being awake, dreaming, and sleeping is not some inner self, nor some
super-ordinary transcendental "I," but the larger living event of which
awakeness is the partial moment.19 The continuity is not the continuation
of some mode of individuation; on the contrary, the continuity is the
continuous non-thetic non-esctatic underbelly to existence: Earth. Awake
I am an individuated whole who is part of a whole, and yet, as someone
who necessarily already has slept, I am only on the condition of having
been indistinguishable from the whole. This is possible because the whole
in question is that absolute whole of all wholes, that partless whole, the
undifferentiated. To deny that I am part of that whole which nevertheless
also is the whole of who I am is to deny the meaning of dreamless sleep.
Such a denial makes sense only as we furtively retain a sense of individ
uation where and when there is none.
Gaps, lapses, fissures where and when Dasein is not: something is
among the living. Here we are part of that whole that is as much cos
mologically biological as worldly historical. Our being is therefore
ambiguous: as open to our own-most death, each and every person is
radically individuated in historical existence. But open to our own-most
sleep, we collectively share in the anonymity of organic and vegetative
life. Authentically being-to ward-sleep, we learn that the truth of
humanity is that we are ambiguously both individuated and the undif
ferentiated.20 There are countless holes in the whole of that awake and

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198 C. ANTON

individuated person who, although authentically reckoning with death,

fails to reckon with the meaning of dreamless sleep.
Awake, I am but one unique body related to many others in a public
world. With authentic being-toward-death my oneness, my self-relation,
intensifies into angst and anticipatory resoluteness. But as individuation
recovers its roots in universally shared sleep, we learn to exist with eyes
half-focused on our common living ground. Authentically being-toward
sleep, we learn to dwell in the ambiguous fact that existence is a limited
and only partial project of living. Wide awake but seeing the world
through our own-most dreamless sleep, we live in the truth of never being
completely resolute, and, joyfully, of already being more and less than we
ever could be in existence.

Notes

1. I thank first Mark S. Pesta?a for the many criticisms that inspired me to write this
paper, and also Stephen C. Rowe and Abe Zakhem for their encouragement
regarding earlier drafts. Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge Valerie V. Peterson
for her helpful editorial assistance.
2. Straus (1966) suggests that much attention has been paid to dreams and dreaming
and comparatively little has been said of being "awake" (cf. his essay, "Awakeness"
in Phenomenological Psychology). And Leder points out that even less has been said
of dreamless sleep: "When attending to the phenomenon of sleep, philosophers and
psychologists have often focused on the dreaming state, for this is the portion of
sleep that most restores an experiential process. However, a dream is only made
possible by a preliminary severance from waking involvements. It is this severance,
this loss of consciousness to the world, that is shared to some degree by all phases of
sleep" (1990, 57).
3. We find a similar passage in 1972, nearly fifty years later, when Heidegger's Zollikon
Seminars include various discussions of sleep and once again focus on dreaming and
awakeness. For example, "In any case, it does not belong to the essence of
dreaming 'to dream' in the same world as it belongs to the essence of waking up, to
wake up into the same world" (Heidegger, 2001, 229).
4. For example, we often wake and have a sense that we dreamt but are unable to recall
anything of the dream. At other times more thorough-going aporia appear: we wake
and have the distinct sense that we had not dreamt at all and this is regardless of the
fact of the matter. William James identifies a related aporia: "In somnambulism,
natural or induced, there is often a great display of intellectual activity, followed by
complete oblivion of all that has passed" (1950, 201).
5. Admittedly, much of Division Two is concerned with historicity and the historical
character of worldliness and Dasein.
6. Just as animals biologically perish though properly speaking they do not mean
ingfully anticipate death, so too animals deal with the loss of awakeness but do not
interpret their own-most sleep. Dasein, that being who exists, not only experiences

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 199

being-toward-death but can understand and interpret its own-most sleep. In both
sleep and death, Dasein shows itself as radically distinct from other forms of life.
7. On this point Johnstone (1976) offers a different challenge to Heidegger's strategy,
one that suggests an account of sleep is needed but for different reasons. It amounts
to the claim that if we had never slept we would not know the meaning of either
consciousness or self-consciousness.
8. Cf. Koestler's (1967) notions of the "holon" and "individuals and dividuals" from
The Ghost in the Machine, 62-90.
9. Where attention to death covers over attention to sleep - where we set death in
contrast to existence rather than to living - we can fail to reveal how sleep is the
absolute wholeness of undifferentiated being. Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the- World
elucidates Heidegger's notion of the who of Dasein (though explicating only
Division One of Being and Time) to illustrate this issue. Dreyfus writes, "Babies get
socialized, but they do not Dasein [verb] until they are already socialized" (1991,
145). If we grant to Dreyfus this reading of Heidegger, we find sleep's bearing upon
the whole of Dasein even more pronounced. Newborn babies it would seem, even
those who are awake, are not yet 'their theres,' are not yet "being-in-the-world."
But then, who is the self of such babies if not yet the they-sel? Apparently, Dasein
emerges atop living being.
10. Johnstone writes, "Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern era of
philosophy, there was a nearly universal belief that death was radical sleep, that at
some later day the dead would all awaken. But the advent of more recent ideas and
ideologies brought about the collapse of the expectation of an awakening" (1976,
231).
11. Cf. the author's (2001) discussion of "Earth" and its relation to "sleeping without
dreaming" (16-26; 49-51; 141-143).
12. We could add that of the two statements only the first one is assured, for I could die
before I factually fall asleep again. But on the other hand, my existence, as ecstatic,
retains an openness to a being-toward-sleep regardless of whether or not death
precludes my next sleep.
13. For Sartre "all consciousness is self-consciousness."
14. Sartre's (1993) succinct defense of pre-thetic consciousness in Transcendence of the
Ego was accomplished by using the ideas from Husserl's The Phenomenology of
Internal Time Consciousness against the later Husserl of Cartesian Meditations. Also
see Merleau-Ponty's (1962) chapter "Temporality" (410-433).
15. Also, see Kesarcodi-Watson (1981) on how the Sanskrit term "caitanya" can be
acceptably translated as "consciousness."
16. It is not that with motion per se comes perception or feeling but rather that
movement is a necessary prerequisite for perception and/or feeling. More address
on the relationship between perception, feeling, and movement can be found in
Jonas's (1966) brief chapter, "To Move and to Feel" (99-107). Regarding the
relationship between perception and movement more generally, Straus offers his
extensive "Sensing and Movement Considered Historiologically" (1963, 189-395).
Finally, for more on the vegetative and nutritive underbelly, "that part of the soul
which is common also to plants," see Agamben's (2004) "Mysterium disiunctionise
17. One of the most powerful sections of Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry's The Wisdom of the
Sands is a chapter where the Chieftain, sleepless and roving the ramparts of the
citadel, finds the night guard sleeping at his post. He writes:

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 200 C. ANTON

That such an one should be punished with death is but fitting. For so much
hangs on his wakefulness: the safety of so many men whose breathing has the
slow cadences of sleep while life replenishes them, pulsing their bosoms like the
throbbing of the far off sea in the recess of a landlocked creek. And the safety of
closed temples full of sacramental treasure slowly gathering like honey, to the
making of which have gone men's sweat and hammerings and chiselings; and of
precious stones unearthed, and the toil of eyes worn out with long poring over
needles as they make the cloth-of-gold blossom with flowers, and delicate devices
wrought by devoted hands. And granaries so well stored that none dread winter's
durance. And sacred books which are the granaries of wisdom and the handsel
of man's best...This is why this man's sleep lays the city naked to her enemies;
and why, when he is found sleeping, he is hauled away and drowned in his own
sleep (1950, 200-201).

18. Many western philosophers have admitted our bodily grounds and need for sleep,
but they also have aligned the essence of the human with the rational and the awake
consciousness. They thus define the human in wholly awakist terms. Sharma writes,
"Hegel, unlike Vedanta, does not seek in dreamless sleep the real clue to the true
face of reality, for, given his conception of humans as essentially thinking beings (in
fact, much like Leibniz, he observes that human beings are thinking, if indetermi
nately, even in sleep), it is the really 'spiritual' waking existence that for him affords
the opportunity for the operation of the modes of thinking, understanding, and
reason" (2001, 16). But not all Western philosophers have so aligned the human
with awake consciousness. We might offer William James, for example, who sug
gests, "Locke was the first prominent champion of this latter view, and the pages in
which he attacks the Cartesian belief are as spirited as any in his Essay. 'Every
drowsy nod shakes their doctrine who teach that their soul is always thinking"'
(1950, 200). On the other hand, James is not entirely without ambiguity on this
point, for he also adds: "our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake,
proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we nevertheless feel. Similarly in
sleep, we grow inured, and sleep soundly in presence of sensations of sound, cold,
contact, etc., which at first prevented our complete repose. We have learned to
neglect them whilst asleep as we should whilst awake" (1950, 201). Giving further
analysis of this position James writes, "Many people have a remarkable faculty of
registering when asleep the flight of time. They will habitually wake up at the same
minute day after day or will wake punctually at an unusual hour determined upon
overnight. How can this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often than anything
the waking consciousness shows) be possible without mental activity during the
interval?" (1950, 201).
19. Sharma writes, "This rupture (which is not to be taken too literally) however, means
(perhaps?) loss not of continuity but only of continual (explicit) awareness of one's
being the same individual or subject - the awareness, in other words, of the unified
entity that one thinks one is as a self-conscious being" (2001, 4).
20. The Mandukya Upanishad states that humans participate in at least three distinct
states of consciousness: Awake consciousness (Vaishvanara), sleeping while
dreaming (Taijasa), and sleeping without dreaming (Prajna). Eknath Easwaran
underscores the vital role played by Prajna: "In dreamless sleep we are not con
scious of forms or impressions; consciousness is undifferentiated, and in fact, the
mind and body rest, as science can detect, but the individual is not aware of it...and

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 DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE 201

of the states experienced before illumination, the Self is closest to its true nature in
prajna" (1987, 63). While dreamless asleep we share a closeness, a nearness to the
ultimate ground of being; we fade into the "undifferentiated." Sleep, as a supple
ment to death, discloses Dasein as more than merely one of many others; my being
is inseparably part of the undifferentiated. Although full address is beyond the
scope of this essay, I here only mention that Martin Buber's / and Thou levels
significant criticism to the Indian position. Recalling a story of the instruction that
Indra receives from Prajapati regarding "how the Self is found and recognized,"
Buber writes, "If a man, sunk in deep sleep, rests dreamlessly, this is the Self, the
Immortal, the Assured, and Universal Being.' Indra departs, but soon a thought
surprises him. He turns back and asks: Tn such a condition, O Exalted One, a man
does not know of his Self that "This is I," and that "these are beings." He is gone to
annihilation. I see nothing propitious here.'?That,' replies Prajapati, 'is indeed so'"
(1958, 88). And from that, Buber then concludes, "the man who has emerged from
this annihilation may still propose, as representing his experience, the limiting
words 'absence of duality'; he does not dare to call it unity" (1958, 88-89). The
position argued for here is that, even if dreamless sleep is better characterized as
"absence of duality" during its occurrence, in authentic being-toward-sleep one's
having-been undifferentiated opens as a unity and shows itself as bearing upon awake
and resolute Dasein. In a word, we are ambiguously both individuated and undif
ferentiated.

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 202 C. ANTON

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