We all know the feeling. We wake up after a good night’s sleep and say, “I slept very well,” “I feel relaxed,” or “I feel refreshed.” The feeling is immediate and unmistakable. Yet there is something intriguing about it. What exactly are we experiencing when we say this? Are we remembering what happened during Deep Sleep? Or is something else happening?
This seemingly ordinary morning experience opens the door to a profound question: What does Consciousness actually know when we wake up from Deep Sleep?
Deep Sleep
Advaita Vedānta considers waking, dream and Deep Sleep to be the three familiar states of experience. Yet the waking mind has no direct access to what was actually present during Deep Sleep. “Deep Sleep” is a name given from the waking state to a condition that the waking mind did not experience as an object.
Sureśvara makes this epistemological point with remarkable precision in his Bṛhadāraṇyaka Vārttika:
न सुषुप्तिगविज्ञानं नाज्ञासिषमिति स्मृतिः ।
कालाद्यव्यवधानत्वान्न ह्यात्मस्थमतीतभाग् ।। 1.4.300, BUBV.
The waking mind cannot have a memory such as “I knew nothing in Deep Sleep” in the ordinary sense of remembering a past object of knowledge. The past state itself is not available for inspection. What is available now is a present mental cognition concerning that past state.
This distinction becomes especially important when we consider the familiar feeling of having had a good sleep.
The “After-glow”
The “happy-feel” factor felt in the awake state is neither an experience nor a memory of what was actually there in that timeless and spaceless Deep Sleep. What is experienced by the awake mind is the “After-glow” of Deep Sleep.
During Deep Sleep, the body-organism is in a very different condition from that of waking. The demands associated with waking are largely absent, while essential physiological functions continue and restorative processes take place. The organism emerges from sleep in a changed condition.
On awaking, the mind does not reach back into Deep Sleep and retrieve an experience of it. It senses the present condition of the body-organism—its relative relaxation, reduced fatigue and greater readiness—and expresses this as, “I had a sound sleep; I feel relaxed.” Similarly, the sense of being refreshed is a present recognition of the organism’s condition.
This is what I call the “After-glow.”
The important point is that the effect of Deep Sleep can be present without Deep Sleep itself becoming a present object of experience or memory. The past has left its effects in the present, and those effects are now available to the waking mind.
Sleep is associated with numerous restorative and regulatory processes involving the body and brain. We need not reduce the After-glow to any one physiological mechanism. The essential observation is simpler: the body-organism wakes in a condition different from the one in which it entered sleep, and the waking mind detects that condition.
As the day progresses, physical and mental activity once again impose demands on the organism. The relaxed and refreshed feeling gradually diminishes. What disappears, therefore, is not some stored memory of Deep Sleep. What changes is the present condition of the body-organism, which the waking mind continually senses.
Energy Dynamics
This brings us to an idea I had explored much earlier under the title “Comfort, Happiness and Energy Dynamics.”
Anything we do requires energy. Eating, walking, talking, thinking and even maintaining the body in a particular environment involve expenditure of energy. The body-organism is constantly engaged in physical, chemical, electrical and mechanical processes.
Consider a simple example. Sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned, carpeted room is easier on the body than sitting outside in the scorching sun. In the latter case, the body has to expend additional energy on thermoregulation and maintaining fluid and electrolyte balance. The air-conditioned environment reduces that burden.
Or consider traveling in a chauffeur-driven car. The destination may be exactly the same whether we drive or someone else drives. But when someone else drives, we are spared the physical and mental effort, attention and tension involved in driving.
In both cases, the desired outcome is achieved with less expenditure of our own energy.
This led me to view comfort, in a broader sense, as an indication of the energy burden on the organism:
Expending less of our own energy gives us “comfort.”
In ordinary usage, comfort usually refers to physical ease, while happiness is regarded as a mental state. But from the standpoint of Energy Dynamics, the distinction need not be so sharp. Happiness can be viewed as a particularly agreeable form of comfort—a state in which the organism and mind experience relatively little burden in relation to the desired condition.
This does not mean that happiness can be reduced to a simple calorie count. The point is more fundamental: the subjective sense of ease is closely related to a reduction in physiological and psychological burden.
Food, Energy and Intelligence
Food provides the chemical energy on which the body-organism depends. But obtaining food, processing it and making it available to the organism also require expenditure of energy. For a sustainable biological system, the energy made available through food must, over time, leave enough net energy for maintenance, repair, growth and reproduction.
Evolution can also be viewed partly through this lens of energy economy. Organisms that achieve necessary outcomes with greater efficiency have an adaptive advantage.
The same idea can be extended, with some qualification, to intelligence. I had earlier expressed it this way:
In terms of energy, intelligence can be defined as the ability to solve a problem expending the least amount of energy. The person who uses less energy is more intelligent.
The deeper idea is cognitive efficiency. When one person grasps something immediately while another needs repeated explanations and several attempts, the first has achieved the same cognitive outcome with less mental effort.
Of course, intelligence is much broader than this. Difficult problems may legitimately require sustained effort, and effort itself is not a sign of lack of intelligence. Nevertheless, the capacity to arrive at an appropriate understanding without unnecessary expenditure is an important aspect of intelligence.
Nature itself appears to favour such economy. Human evolution, the development of tools, agriculture, food preparation and technological innovation can all be viewed, at least in part, as ways of obtaining desired outcomes with less expenditure of human effort.
Deep Sleep as an Energy Dynamic
We can now return to Deep Sleep.
During waking, the body-organism continuously expends energy. Muscles remain active, the senses process an enormous amount of information, the mind engages in thought and decision-making, and the body continually maintains its internal equilibrium. Even when we appear to be doing nothing, the organism is energetically active.
Deep Sleep provides a radically different condition. The demands associated with waking are largely suspended, while the organism continues its essential physiological functions and engages in restorative processes.
The significance of this becomes apparent only after waking.
We do not have to remember Deep Sleep in order to know that we are refreshed. The body-organism has changed. The waking mind detects that changed condition and gives it a name: “I feel relaxed,” “I am refreshed,” or “I slept well.”
The After-glow, therefore, can be understood as the present manifestation of a condition produced, in part, by what happened during Deep Sleep.
The sequence is:
Deep Sleep → restorative processes → changed condition of the body-organism → present sensing by the waking mind → feeling of relaxation and refreshment.
The waking mind experiences only the last part of this sequence.
(To Continue … Part – 2/2)