Topical Guide 600
Mark Dorset
Consciousness: Loss of, in Sleep
Thinking
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 14:
Matthew said, “I couldn’t get to sleep at night because I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. My mother told me to try thinking about something else, so I did, but whatever I tried thinking about would turn into thinking about the question. Every time. […] I fell asleep finally, […] but I’m not sure when. […] Of course, you’ve probably already guessed that by the time I finally did fall asleep, […] I was thinking about the question. I realized that I was wondering where being awake stops and being asleep starts. […] So […] that’s when I realized that […] the question is […] a question about how our minds work […].”
Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character:
This “stream of consciousness” reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, “Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn’t have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: ‘How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? […] How does the mind actually turn off?’”
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would […] pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I’d watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I’d go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observations—it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn’t aware that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn’t wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, “Oh, the tension will take care of that,” and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don’t notice that they’re not logically connected until you ask yourself, “What made me think of that?” and you try to work your way back, and often you can’t remember what the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they’re completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
See also:
Thinking: Focusing the Attention TG 132; TG 528
Talking to Oneself (“Self-Talk”) TG 511
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