Philosophy East and West

Introduction

The phenomenon of sleep would not pose the kind of problem it does if we were not, besides other things, sleeping beings. It also would not pose much of a problem if we were not waking beings, too. It poses a problem precisely because we are both, just as irrationality, for example, poses a problem because we are also rational beings, at least potentially. These, again, and many other things besides, pose a problem because we are "thinking" beings, by which I mean here, roughly, reflective beings. And reflection is not reflection if it is not at least an act of distinguishing.

Now if we put aside the phenomenon of dreams, there is one radical difference between waking and deep (dreamless) sleep (called jāgrat and suṅ??upti, respectively, in classical Indian philosophy) that immediately comes to mind as we reflect on these states: while we are aware of being awake when we are awake, we are not aware of being asleep when we are asleep. We can generally tell ourselves and others what it means to be awake when we are awake, while we cannot tell ourselves, let alone others, what it means to be asleep when we are asleep. And not only this; other things remaining the same, we can even tell ourselves and the world that we are awake, while, strictly speaking, we can tell neither ourselves nor the world that we are asleep, nor for that matter that we are dreaming when we dream. There is a certain undoubted queerness in talking (or thinking) about sleep or dreams in the present tense. In one clear sense, then, there is a diminution of at least a certain kind of awareness during sleep, an awareness that normally persists, now more clearly, now less clearly, throughout the state of wakefulness. But although there is no awareness, during sleep, of being asleep, there is perhaps, as I shall later on briefly argue, an experience of sleep—an experience, that is, of what sleep is like— that occurs, and can occur, only during sleep. What I wish to say is that although it is only in waking that the phenomenon or, say, the meaning of sleep can become the object of conscious thought, this thought about it, irrespective of the theorizing to which it may lead, cannot become a real and significant possibility unless we have had the experience of it when we were actually asleep. In other words, there is nothing in the wakeful condition from which an account of sleep can be elicited, although it remains true that it is not within the confines of sleep that a positive portrayal of sleep can become possible.

Indeed, the experience of sleep, although perhaps philosophically valuable and even coveted in itself, is unlike almost all other experiences, and in a very special [End Page 210] sense. While in other experiences the persons concerned are ordinarily and in a manifest sense self-aware—aware, that is, that the experience in question is happening to them and are thus aware of being indissolubly involved, as a subject, in that experience—the experience of sleep seems to be lacking in this self-awareness. I am, for example, not aware in sleep that this particular experience (of sleep) is mine, although in the waking life I am always aware that the experience I am suffering (presently) is mine. In fact, even in dreams I am aware of myself as the subject to whom certain things are happening, even if I have no notion that all these things are nothing but images apparently coming out of nothing and masquerading as real objects and events. The difference between dreaming and waking is, however, of a different order and is certainly not with respect to the demonstrably explicit awareness that one has of the subject who happens to experience these two states. Indeed, prima facie it sounds remarkable—and I hope these remarks will not be taken as a digression—that even someone like Descartes should first feel unable to find a dependable criterion by which to distinguish dreaming from waking¹ and then find if...