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The psychology of sleep

Chapter 64: APPENDIX B ABSTRACT FROM ARTICLE: “LUMINOUS SLEEP”
By Bolton Hall
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About This Book

This work surveys sleep from psychological, physiological, practical, and moral perspectives, blending practical advice with discussion of theory and history. It addresses how much and when to sleep, causes of wakefulness such as pain and habit, and nonpharmacological methods for inducing rest, including fresh air, breathing, diet, natural living, and behavioral routines. It examines dreams, hypnotic sleep, and the special needs of invalids, critiques reliance on opiates, and explores how fear, worry, and social or economic conditions shape rest. Throughout it stresses habit formation, simplicity, and harmony with natural law as means to restore refreshing, healthful sleep.

APPENDIX B
ABSTRACT FROM ARTICLE: “LUMINOUS SLEEP”

By P. Arunochalam

Deep sleep is a sleep of darkness, that is, the sleep of the nerves, and the utter relaxation of the body. Its refreshment is due to absence of thought.

Is there a sleep of light, a luminous sleep, in which, while there is absence of thought, there is not darkness and oblivion, but perfect consciousness? To suppose this did not seem irrational to the Greeks. (An instance is cited of the abstracted moods of Socrates, Sympos: 174-5.) (Further citations of this eccentricity of Socrates are in: The Tamil Sage; Charmides; Phaedrus; The Republic; also Tennyson, “The Ancient Sage.”)

This reality, sleep that is a sort of abstraction from the bodily condition, is pure consciousness of spirit, “Luminous sleep,” an intellectual and spiritual condition as contrasted with physical sleep. To the general aspects of the genius and life of Ancient Greece, to its philosophy of the reality of pure abstraction, of absolute knowledge and the possibility of attaining it, such a theory would seem reasonable.

Dr. Jowett is cited as maintaining that pure abstraction is mere negation.