I would like to suggest that there have been two primary paradigms into which our view of sleep has fallen historically. I’m going to indulge in some generalizations here, but I’m mostly unapologetic. I have a handful of caveats which I may bring out if my panel backs me into a corner. But first I’m going to try to be clear and distinct, even if I have to paint a little more broadly than I would have if I had more time to state my position.

So…The first paradigm I’d like to introduce is the pre-modern view, which is that sleep frees the soul from the encumbrances of the body. In this paradigm, when a person passes the threshold from waking into sleep, the soul enters an immaterial world, a better, (you might even say) fuller world in which dreams and visions open up a spectrum of knowledge that earth-bound man cannot experience.

The pre-modern view of sleep of course is based on the presupposition that the soul exists, and that it can exist independently of the body. Plato argued that the soul was free and soaring, and directed the mind and body like a charioteer directs a “pair of winged horses” (Phaedrus). When asleep, the soul is free from the body. Cicero wrote that the soul is more “vigorous” during sleep, “and since the soul has lived through all eternity…it therefore beholds all things in the universe.” In dreams, Cicero believed, the soul despises the body, and wanders about the universe, divining secret knowledge.

Even today, there are many cultures which hold onto these ideas of sleep and soul-wandering. The modernists might call them “primitive” cultures, but one tribe in Sumatra believes that a sleeper’s face must under no condition be masked or altered by some malicious prankster into a forced smile, lest the soul not recognize its owner when it returns from its nightly adventures. In Indonesia at least as recently as the 1950s, the death penalty was sometimes executed on those who would stain, tattoo, or otherwise disguise the face of a sleeping person.

Many Asian peoples still believe that sleepers should be awakened slowly, so that the soul has sufficient time to get back to the body. In the 3rd century, the church father Tertullian related the popular story of a man named Hermotimus: “They say that he used to be deprived of his soul in his sleep, as if it wandered away from his body like a person on a holiday trip.” His wife, who apparently didn’t like him too much, told Hermotimus’ enemies of this fact, and they decided to dispatch him during his sleep. The people of the poor man’s town felt horrible for him, apparently, and so decided to build a temple for his lost soul, and forbade any women from entering lest they offend Hermotimus’ soul with a remembrance of his treacherous wife.

Tertullian dismisses the idea that sleep is an exclusively supernatural state, and then outlines the different views of Greek philosophy on the question of What is sleep? The Stoics say it is a suspension of the activity of the senses. The Epicureans say it is the intermission of the animal spirit. Democritus says sleep is the soul’s laziness. And so on.

But another Church Father takes a much more practical view of sleep. While the pagans saw sleep as a portal into a higher realm, Clement of Alexandria sees it as a barely necessary evil. He argued the point that Christians shouldn’t wear soft pajamas, or colorful dressing gowns. Neither should we sleep on soft mattresses or do anything which encourages sleep. The Christian should instead be someone who is always ready to wake up and work, awaiting the end of days. Who needs sleep and comfort? After all, Jacob laid his head down on a stone to sleep and was counted worthy to see a vision of angels ascending and descending the ladder to heaven. Lot, on the other hand, gave himself to a drunken sleep and—we all know what happened after that. For Clement, the Christian should engage in a fight against sleep all his life, so that he might have a longer and more productive life, not wasted in slumber.

But even though the early Christian fathers, like Tertullian and Clement dismissed the pagan ideas of soul-wandering and the idea that sleeping was superior to waking, they still saw it as a state in which God was specially active. Tertullian makes a long defense of how truth is revealed in dreams. Clement “saw sleep as a time of special receptivity to spiritual reality,” as Morton Kelsey points out.

This all changes with the entrance of our second major paradigm. Moving out of the pre-modern world, we come to the modern world, where sleep is a not a portal to another kind of reality. Rather, it is a mechanism. And, until the middle part of the 20th century, it was a mechanism which didn’t seem to interest modernists very much. The father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, talked of how when he dreamed, he saw and experienced things which would have qualified him as a madman if it had happened to him while waking. And until the past few decades, this frightful world of nightmares and visions was impossible to examine scientifically. And so, as Amanda Schaffer points out, until the 1950s, most scientists left the topic alone—assuming that sleep was an inactive state, a somatic parenthesis in life—it is oblivion. Psychologists like Freud and Jung had their theories about sleep, although they’ve fallen into disrepute in the past twenty or so years. Freud had this endearing definition of sleep: it “is an act which reproduces intra-uterine existence, fulfilling the conditions of repose, warmth, and absence of stimulus.” Neurologists during the 1950s repeated their own jingly definition: “Sleep arrives as dendrites dwindle.” No chariots of winged horses here and nighttime adventures where the soul escapes off to Never Land like some JM Barrie character. Now there are only dendrites and intra-uterine existence.

In just the past few years, sleep researchers have begun to broaden their horizons. Sleep is no longer just a return to the womb, nor is it explained simply as the activity which is required when the neurons get tired. Ever since the discovery of rapid-eye movement patterns in the early 50s, sleep scientists have been searching for a modern answer to the question: What happens when we sleep? Since we obviously do not enter into a spiritual dimension, there must be something natural which explains why we need sleep. The most prevalent theory of late has been memory retention (although, again, many have alternate theories). One neurologist believes that right as we enter the state of sleep, a “small pocket of cells in the brainstem spurs a surge in glutamate — an activating chemical — which leads to protein synthesis and other changes that support long-term memory storage.” While we are awake, we are taking in so much information that we cannot possibly process it all. The library shelves are overflowing, so at night someone has to rearrange and clean up—this is the activity which, according to these scientists, is somehow at work during the period of rapid eye movement.

In order to test this hypothesis out, the scientists at this particular university performed an experiment in which two groups of students were given a large load of information to memorize—one group was forced to stay awake, while the other was allowed to nap for a short while. In the end, this experiment led these modern scientists to an astonishing conclusion: people who are well-rested are better prepared to work and remember. That’s what billions of dollars of scientific grants can do at a public university.

The matter of dreams is even more difficult for the modern paradigm to explain. The foremost sleep theorist of our time, James Allan Hobson, has proposed that dreams are caused by the random firing of neurons in the cerebral cortex during the early REM period. According to the theory, the forebrain then creates a story in an attempt to reconcile and make sense of the nonsensical sensory information presented to it, hence the odd nature of many dreams. Of course, this is not technically an attempt at explaining the origin of the dreams—only a very sketchy examination of the way that dreams look during a brain scan. It’s the what and the how of sleep, and not the why, which science thinks it will be able to answer.

So our two paradigms—modern and pre-modern—arrive at two very different ends. The pre-modern view of sleep sees slumber a spiritual experience—an escape. The modern view assumes that once science has arrived at the final answer, sleep will be revealed as a completely natural experience—one which evolution has provided for us to live well and industriously.

I’d like to suggest that both the pre-modern and the modern paradigms have problems. The modern problems, I believe, are readily apparent in the way that modern science presupposes that there is no spiritual world which might possibly intrude upon us during sleep. Of course, the modernists don’t believe that the spiritual world can affect us while we’re awake—why should that change when we fall asleep?

The problem with the pre-modern view is a bit more nuanced. And to address this, I’d like to propose some sketchy beginnings to an incarnational view of sleep. I said at the beginning that sleep can be viewed from three angles: What happens during sleep. Why we sleep. And what sleep means to us.

The modern paradigm provides completely natural explanations of these questions. The pre-modern (pagan) view supposes that the soul is meant to get free of body, and that the why and the meaning of sleep follow from that supernatural experience. I would like to suggest that we are not getting a full picture of sleep if we assume that only the natural or only the supernatural is involved in our slumber. In fact, there is something about sleep which effectively teaches us about the relationship between soul and body.

The Bible provides a large volume of material on sleep, all of which draws out the antithesis starkly. Those who trust in God are promised fruitful sleep, while the lazy are cursed with the abundance of the very thing which was supposed to be a blessing. But at the very heart of the Bible’s language about sleep is the close analogy between sleep and death. The close relationship between these two things led the Church Father Irenaeus to assert that before the Fall Adam must not have experienced sleep (which he argued, ironically, while commenting on the passage in Genesis in which God puts Adam to sleep in order to create Eve).

But the connection between death and sleep is at the heart of our Christian view of sleep. How we view sleep mirrors how we view death, and vice versa. The pre-modern pagan looks for the soul to be freed from the body—that is salvation. So both sleep and death provide an escape from matter into a more beautiful world. For the modern pagan, sleep and death are both black holes, chemical processes which have no meaning and fulfill only natural necessities. The flesh is weary, so it sleeps and it eventually dies.

But for the Christian—contrary to the modernist—sleep and death are good things. Sleep and death are times when God makes His presence and His power known to us in special ways.

For example, James Jordan has pointed out how what the Bible calls “deep sleep” often seems to refer to death itself (Psalm 76:6). Adam is put into a deep sleep when God creates Eve. Abraham is put into a deep sleep when God cuts His covenant with him (Gen 15:12). And the early Church Fathers made a typological connection to the three days of “deep sleep” which Christ experienced. In each case, death (or deep sleep) does not fulfill either of the pagan ideals. Instead of freeing the soul from the body, or annihilating the body’s existence, death and sleep create. Sleep has a creative power. God puts Adam into a death-sleep and creates the beautiful creature Eve. Abraham goes into horror-filled deep sleep, but awakes to the realization that Yahweh appeared and made a physical covenant with Him among the split animal parts. And Christ’s death-sleep gave birth, as Augustine argued, to the Church: as “Eve was born from the side of her sleeping spouse… the Church was born from the dead Christ by the mystery of blood which gushed forth from his side.”

This is the fundamental difference between the two paradigms I proposed earlier and the Christian view of sleep. The Christian does not long for the soul’s escape from the body. And he certainly does not expect oblivion in either sleep or death. What should a Christian expect in sleep, then?

If we return to Tertullian, I think we can find at least the beginning of an answer. After his dismissal of the pre-modern idea of soul-wandering, he still allows that the soul remains alert while the body rests during sleep. This is what accounts for our dreams. He writes:

The fact is, it cannot rest or be idle altogether, nor does it confine to the still hours of sleep the nature of its immortality. It proves itself to possess a constant motion; it travels over land and sea, it trades, it is excited, it labours, it plays, it grieves, it rejoices, it follows pursuits lawful and unlawful…

But even while the soul gets this exercise while the body rests, it betrays the sense of how much it needs to be joined again to the body. This is the crucial point: it is unnatural for the body and soul to be separated, which is ultimately what both pre-modern and modern paganism argue against. Tertullian gives us the very heart of the answer to the question, What is sleep?:

When the body shakes off its slumber, it asserts before your eye the resurrection of the dead by its own resumption of its natural functions. Such, therefore, must be both the natural reason and the reasonable nature of sleep. If you only regard it as the image of death, you initiate faith, you nourish hope, you learn both how to die and how to live, you learn watchfulness, even while you sleep.

Sleep is a parable of the resurrection. When we sleep we are taught to hope for the resurrection. Soul and body are meant to be joined together. The image of God is complete when the breath of divine life is given to the body. There can be no ultimate divorce between body and soul, between the natural and the supernatural. Adam’s flesh receives the even spirit of life. Genesis 2:7 even teaches that God put a soul into Adam through his nose.

Sleep, like death, is therefore a hope to those who await the coming resurrection and justification before God. We long to be reunited, restored, and have the breath of God renewed within us as both the first and the second Adam experienced. But for carnal man, there is no such hope. If you remember Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on death and sleep—he begins with the question: if life is oppressive, isn’t it better to end it all in the sleep of death?

To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…

Throughout Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet is in many respects a figure who combines both the pre-modern and modern paradigms that I’ve been using. He is drawn to an older antique Roman paganism which is drawn to vengeance and suicide—the freeing of the soul from the concerns of the body. But at the same time, he is haunted by the prospect that, when the soul is freed from the body, who knows what nightmares will await it.

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Hamlet hates life, but has no confidence in what awaits him beyond the veil. Sleep brings nightmares and a demon from hell. Death is a dark undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned. So he is ultimately destroyed by his lack of faith, or trust in the justice of God.

The Christian, however, has every right to place his trust in the God who never sleeps (Ps 1213-4). The Lord gives his beloved sleep (Ps 127). In peace we can lie down and sleep, for God makes us to dwell in safety (Ps 4:8). When we lie our head on our pillow (or our stone, if Clement had his way), we entrust our soul and body to God. We lie down in a death-sleep and are resurrected each morning. As St. Hilary put it, in the morning, “everything is found once again: the flesh is there, likewise the spirit, none of God’s works is lost.” It is in this hope that we were taught to pray:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.