They say that sleeping is something that is indistinguishable from death within our consciousness, where the subconscious can sometimes apparently roam as might happen with an NDE (Near Death Experience) or a mind-altering experience. Yet most people do not have an NDE on a regular basis, or so they think. In Dreamy, or Terrifying? I discuss a certain angle of sleep and its related ‘activities’. But when there is speculation of being able to ‘leave’ this physical plane while unconscious, and that we all need sleep, I thought of sayings we have for things related to sleeping and being dead –

Sleeping like the dead – I always believed this to be about the how deeply you are asleep, and if you are able to be woken easily or not.

Dead to the world – as with this one, so deeply asleep that you are completely cut off from the ‘real world’ while your mind is actually somewhere else.

Dead tired – when you are so tired you feel like you are dragging yourself around, and have become as weighty as a corpse perhaps. On the brink of sleep, where your body and mind start initiate the sleep phase, whether you are ready for it or in the right location or not.

Death warmed up – not usually attritibuted to sleep, but to a waking state and often one of illness. Where you feel so rotten and would benefit from sleep or at a minimum some rest, but have to keep going about your day as you normally would. The wording making me think you have checked out to that ‘sleep/death’ state, but your body has to keep going through the motions of an animated corpse. Hence, death warmed up.

Land of the living – often said as ‘back to the land of the living’, again usually around illness, a phase that sometimes is known to precede actual death, but is also one that more often than not, will require sleep and rest. But saying you have come back to somewhere, means in a way, you think you were somewhere else.

There is talk that death is just an altered state of our consciousness, and what we believe to be ‘life after death’, is in fact, just another dimension of existence we inhabit after our physical body and the material world is no longer of use. And one we have ended up calling The Other Side. But if consciousness does exist outside of the brain and body, it stands to reason that once the physical has expired, whatever existed within that, then just carries on existing somewhere else.

Imagine living two lifetimes every day, one that what we know as the waking day for two thirds of it, and a shorter portion allocated for the sleeping one, yet both existing as separate lifetimes running simultaneously, playing tag with each other. While you are awake here, you are asleep there, kind of thing, neither ceasing to exist just because the other ‘wakes up’. Like day and night, a perpetual hand over each day from dark to light and back again, but just as sometimes the moon isn’t always visible at night, and sometimes can be seen during the day, it’s not always as clear cut as we think. Asleep or awake? Dreaming or reality? Or even alive or dead? How does our consciousness understand the differences in those definitions I wonder, and realised that perhaps it doesn’t…

(c) MKW Publishing