An Ontological Exposition

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Human Studies (2006) 29: 181-202 ? Springer 2006

DOI 10.1007/s 10746-006-9018-5

Dreamless Sleep and theWhole of Human Life: An Ontological

Exposition

COREY ANTONGrand Valley State University, 266 LSH, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401-9403,

USA

(E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. This paper explores the meaning of dreamless sleep. First, I consider four

reasonswhy

wecommonly pass

oversleep's ontological significance. Second,

Icompare

and contrast death and sleep to show how each is oriented to questions regarding the

possibilities of "being-a-whole." In the third and final part, I explore the meaning and

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 can

recover an authentic?

if somewhat ambiguoussense of "being-a-whole" only by

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 back

ground from which the life of higher animals gets separated.

(Giorgio Agamben, The Open, 14).

Twilight is intimate because here nature veils the boundaries sepa

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

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

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 of

dreamlesssleep

but because we can reduce ourselves to our awake

existences, we easily deny the ambiguity of the whole of who we are. As

Sharma (2001) writes, "Sleep would not pose the kind of problem it does

if we were not, besides other things, sleeping beings. It also would not



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 isthat 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 isMostly 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 thata

question such as, "What does sleepmean

for the wholeof 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



DREAMLESS SLEEPAND THEWHOLE 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). Itmay help to recall

that Ren? Descartes' skepticism was funded largely by dream analogies,

hispoint being

that we can be fooled inwaking

lifejust

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 beingawake and

sleeping,

as basic modesproper

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 harmonyaccessible 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 wayin 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 wedon'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.



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 isone 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 ifmy 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 remainobfuscated 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.

Circumscribingthe whole of our lives to moments of awakeness

(oreven 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



DREAMLESS SLEEPAND 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 Iwill 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

"livingnon-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 itsmode 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



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 inthe 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 wespeak

ofdeath,

does notsignify

Dasein'sBeing-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




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

standing, we open to the possibility of authentically reckoning with finitude. 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 wouldbe 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,



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 thatwas

oursuniquely, 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




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.

"Indeep 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 iswithout 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

ourawakeness

can encounterothers and acknowledge them

asequally

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



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




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 tomore 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 itwas 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...Onlyin 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



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 methat 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.

Dreamlesssleep

cannot be a

presentcontent of

myconsciousness

-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 andthematic, explicitly posits as "I" in accompaniment to experience. Two

further clarifications must be made here. First, the notion of pre-theticor operative intentionality, though not positing an "I" in addition to




experience, does not deny the "mineness" of any present experience; this

is partly why Sartre speaks of both non-positional and positional consciousness 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 wokenup

is tosay

I know /Ve wokenup (1981, 268).

Awake existence has an ecstatical character, meaning that retentions and

protentions penetrate and intermingle with present awareness and this



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 asspectators

of our ownsleep.

It issufficient 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 meaningfullyenters existence in less than direct or immediate ways. Although it has

never been a present experience for anyone, dreamless sleep is preciselythat 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 reckoningwith 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 anonymous 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.



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. Surfacefunctions 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

extensivemotility

insleep

that ispart

andparcel

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 ismade plain ifwe 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.

Asa

result, most of the world has onlyseen

my bodywhen 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



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

sleepercannot 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 traditionallymeans 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




the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and

to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involvesnothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than

M?nchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up and into existence bythe hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. (Nietzsche, 1968, 218)

The anticipatory resoluteness that ismade 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 havingbeen 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



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 inspiredme to write this

paper, and also Stephen C. Rowe and Abe Zakhem for their encouragement

regarding earlier drafts. Finally, Iwant 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




being-toward-death but can understand and interpret its own-most sleep. In both

sleepand

death,Dasein shows itself as

radicallydistinct 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 perceptionor 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:



200 C. ANTON

That such an one should be punished with death is but fitting. For so much

hangson his wakefulness: the

safetyof so

manymen whose

breathinghas 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 asthey 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 arethinking, 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 canneglect 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 ourcomplete repose. We have learned to

neglect them whilst asleepas 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 orsubject

-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 Easwaranunderscores the vital role played by Prajna: "In dreamless sleep we are not con

scious of forms orimpressions; consciousness is undifferentiated, and in fact, the

mind and body rest, as science can detect, but the individual is not aware of it...and




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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