Where do you go when you sleep?

Here’s a strange thought: every night, you lie down, close your eyes and willingly let go of your ordinary waking awareness.

Then, usually, you come back in the morning and carry on being yourself — hopefully after coffee.

That is an astonishingly normal thing to do.

The disappearing act

Not all sleep is dreamless, and sleeping brains are very much alive and active. Sleep is not death, and it’s not scientifically accurate to treat the two as equivalent.

But from the perspective of what we later remember, there can be a gap. One moment it’s bedtime. The next, it’s morning. The hours in between may have no continuous story available to us.

So how do we know we’re still the same person?

A lot of the answer lies in continuity: the body remains alive, the brain continues functioning, and the memories, habits and relationships that shape us are still there when we wake.

The question underneath

If our moment-to-moment awareness changes so radically, perhaps identity isn’t exactly the same thing as being continuously conscious.

Maybe it’s the deeper pattern that carries across those interruptions.

The thought to take away

Conscious experience comes and goes in different forms. The mystery is why the person we recognise persists through the changes.

Also, why is it that a six-hour sleep lasts approximately four minutes, but five minutes waiting for the kettle feels like a geological era?