Art by smbc-comics
Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.
Pubmed Articles
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Sciencealert Article We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists
Sleep is NOTHING like death. You're still experiencing lots of stuff, you still very much have a sense of self, you're still thinking things, your brain is still processing lots of information.
General anesthesia - now THAT is a real close period to what being dead is.
I've had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
If death is like that, then there's absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.
See for me I'm not sure why that's hard to accept. I think I first heard it from Alan Watts, that there were billions of years of space before I was conscious, so why am I afraid of billions of years of nothing after I'm gone?
Not having something in the first place and losing something you have are two different things. It's like saying to someone who just lost their partner "don't feel bad, for the first n years of your life you didn't have a partner and you were fine"
Additionally, it's not billions of years of nothing. It's an eternity of nothing. Billions of years may as well be the blink of an eye relative to eternity.
God, I'm getting anxious just talking about it.
I didn’t say i was afraid of it, just that it seemed unlikely. The billions before you were conscious ended somehow, right?