Dr Tomatis believes that the need for sleep is exaggerated. His findings suggest that the cortex needs constant energy inputs via sensory intake and, as most people don’t have enough mind stimulating activities, they turn to sleep as an escape and a refuge. Similarly, James M. Kruger, whilst assistant professor at Chicago Medical School, stated: “For all we know, we don’t need sleep. If we had a drug that blocked the effect of the sleep factor in the brain, we might be able to stay awake twenty-four hours a day without ill effects.” Reducing sleep has been used as a positive tool in many spiritual contexts to alter states of consciousness. Many religious traditions advocate the use of short or extended periods without sleep in order to access spiritual insight and such practice is even hinted at in one of the most ancient texts of all – the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh: Who will assemble the gods unto thee, that thou mayest find the life which thou seekest? Come, do not sleep for six days and seven nights. The hero Gilgamesh, in his quest for immortality, is challenged to defeat sleep, the younger brother of Death, by not sleeping for six days and seven nights. We are told that he failed – as soon as he squatted down on his haunches, sleep, like a fog, breathed over him. But the very fact that conquering sleep is mentioned at all in the context of attaining a spiritual goal is significant, particularly as this is one of the earliest stories ever committed to writing. This tradition is parallelled in the Vedas. In these primary Indian scriptures we are told of all night rituals in which participants drank ‘soma’ – an invigorating drink that killed the demons of the night, prevented sleep and brought about sun-like visions of the gods. Perhaps the ancients knew something we are only beginning to rediscover. Sleep deprivation and spiritual practice come together in some form in most religions. Buddhists regularly engage in all night periods of meditation (linked to the lunar cycle) and most monastic traditions have some restrictions on sleep, usually starting observances before dawn. The Buddha himself attained enlightenment after, according to one account, spending seven days and nights awake, in deep meditation, under the Bodhi tree. In North America too, the vision quests and sun dances of the indigenous people entail days and nights of continual practise. Despite the general perception that plenty of regular sleep is necessary for normal function, such a range of clues suggests that this may not be strictly true. From sleep walking (a state in which some part of the brain is asleep whilst another part is active and functional) and the deep insights that can emerge through dreams to the extraordinary outpourings of the sleeping prophet, Edgar Cayce, many anomalies remain unexplained. Could it be that an explanation may lie in a differential requirement for sleep between each half of the brain?
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 07:36:15 +0000
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