In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”
Sleep; a state of reduced consciousness, perhaps even altered consciousness when taking dream state into account. Sleep and death surround the same concept; loss of consciousness and dissociation from one’s physical body. In his collection of essays, Schopenhauer writes, “Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.”
To say that humans should fear sleep because they fear death would be an unfair claim, one is a temporary loss of control whilst the other is very permanent. You may slumber as you please, whether it be for hours or even for a few minutes, then wake up and do it again. However—you cannot die twice. Much like the stages of life from birth, growth and decline, sleep too starts with gaining consciousness, getting tired and surrendering consciousness. So then, do humans fear death because of its uncertainty? After all, no living being truly knows what happens after you die, yet everyone knows what follows sleep. For every difficult minute spent working during the day, the only plausible solution when recovering from exertion or sickness is to get a good night’s rest.
Even he who fears losing his sentience cannot stop himself from sleeping or dying. To repose is an inevitable part of the human condition, yet, because it occurs as a daily routine, we often mistake it for something that lies within our control. Going to bed at the same hour each night creates the comforting illusion that we command sleep, when in reality we merely respond to a biological necessity. Whether we choose to rest early or resist it, the need for slumber eventually asserts itself. We do not decide when our bodies require rest; we only decide whether to heed or postpone that call. In this sense, our perceived sense of control over this condition is not true mastery, but rather accommodation to an unavoidable force. Despite humanity’s desire for autonomy, there are aspects of existence that remain beyond the reach of our will.
Sleep is one aspect of life we can’t capture, whether that be dream content or controlling how we behave in a dream, what we say, what we do, who we see and how we feel. Much of our dream content is inspired from real life. It could be what we really want to see, deeper anxieties that we have suppressed, or random thoughts and feelings we have accumulated. According to science, dreams have no meaning at all. Then why, however, do some dreams feel like premonitions? Why does it hurt so much to see a person who’s no longer in our life in a dream? A study from IMT school for Advanced Studies Lucca suggests that dreams are not simply a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we live through.
Dreams clearly have psychological meaning, even if they are not prophetic. They usually involve emotions and broad situations rather than precise details, making them easy to connect to later experiences. If a situation seems troubling, like the loss of a loved one, our subconscious mind recognizes that emptiness and projects those intense feelings into a dream, creating a false sense of prophecy, because the meaning attached to that dream is something you experience in the real world. This is only because the situation is occupying our conscious mind. For a few moments, the emotional experience in the dream feels real. You may have spoken to that person, hugged them, or simply existed with them as though nothing had changed. Then consciousness returns, bringing reality alongside it. In a sense, you experience the loss twice: once when it happened in real life, and again in the instant you wake and realize it wasn’t real.
If, during the dream, our emotions are genuine, then in what sense was the experience “less real”? The conversation didn’t happen in the external world, but your grief, joy, relief, or longing were authentically experienced. Here is where the line between objective reality and subjective experience is blurred. This also ties into the philosophical mystery of consciousness. While dreaming, you often accept impossible situations without question. Only upon waking do you recognize the dream as unreal. It raises the question: if consciousness can construct an entire believable world each night, how certain can we always be about the nature of our waking experience? Maybe each night we leave one state of consciousness and enter another. We cannot remember the transition because memory preserves only what is most significant, just as a lifetime is remembered through only a few defining moments. The longer we remain in that other state before waking, the more of it fades away.
One can never know exactly when we go to sleep. You can record when you wake up or know what time you entered bed but the exact moment when your body surrenders its consciousness is uncertain to us all. This surrender of thought and feeling is often a blessing, a chance to simply stop existing for a while. It reflects the idea of “sleeping your problems away,” allowing enough time to pass that the burdens you carry no longer feel as heavy.
Consciousness; the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings. Consciousness cannot watch itself disappear or be created, as the moment it disappears there is no one left to observe. Sleep demonstrates this perfectly. Every night we fall asleep, yet never remember the exact moment cognizance slips away. No one truly knows what the sensation of being unconscious is really like, because this observation would require you to be conscious. Similarly, if sleep is like death, with death being loss of all consciousness, then we may only experience being near death—but never death itself. What’s interesting is that we only infer what happens the moment following us no longer being awake. You are only in control of the instances you are wakeful, which stops the moment you fall asleep, and stays that way until you wake up. This implies that no one has ever actually experienced sleeping, just what it feels like being near it.
Without the certainty of awakening, extended periods of unconsciousness become deeply unsettling, much like the experience of a family waiting beside a loved one in a coma. In a coma, the body continues to function, the heart beats and the lungs breathe but the conscious mind is absent or severely impaired. If someone spent ten years in this state and awoke with no awareness of the time that’s passed, those years would, from their perspective, never have existed. The final moment before losing consciousness and the first after waking would feel adjacent, as though no time had passed. This idea is echoed in the science fiction concept of cryosleep, where a person’s body temperature, heart rate, breathing, and metabolism are drastically reduced, allowing them to remain unconscious for months, years, or even centuries. Nature offers a similar phenomenon through hibernation, with grizzly bears sleeping for up to five to seven months. Yet neither cryosleep nor hibernation is inherently frightening. What makes a coma so disturbing is not unconsciousness itself, but the uncertainty of whether consciousness will ever return.
It is as Schopenhauer suggests at the beginning of this essay: living is like borrowing capital, while sleep, a temporary form of death, is the interest we continually pay until the final payment is made through death itself. In essence, we die a little every night so that our bodies may restore themselves and keep death at bay. Life is borrowed, never truly ours to begin with, which is why, eventually, it must be given back. In the end, life is not measured by the years that pass, but by the moments in which we are present to experience them, until all of us are ultimately reduced to nothing.
Sarah Shahzad
Associate Editor (2026-2027)
