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Every night as regular as a clock, you lose your awareness to somewhere or nowhere. One moment you’re dropping off then the next you’re waking up with only dregs of a dream to recall as evidence you were still here.

But here’s the mind shake: Where exactly where you?

We’re not talking about dreams, those surreal, time-warped stories that may feel like other worldly. I am asking about that blank timeless space where you’re out of it.

That long stretch of seemly unconsciousness state where not even a blip of thought remains. Did you go somewhere?

The Scientific View

Sleep is a journey through several neurological phases, we know this. When you drift off you pass through the hypnagogic state as you naturally do in hypnotherapy deepening sessions.

That hazy, fragmented stage where thoughts dissolve and images flicker. From there, you sink into non-REM sleep moving through stages 1 to 4.

By stages 3 and 4, deep sleep, your brain is humming along in delta waves, the slowest frequency of electrical activity.

Your prefrontal cortex, (I did my research) the command center of your conscious mind, quietens down. Your self-awareness drops away and memory formation stops.

If someone woke you in this state you might be disoriented, groggy, momentarily unmoored or shout at them or the barking dog for waking you, you know this as you have done this.

Where are you in that moment?

Neuroscience says nowhere. Your narrative sense of self is gone. The you or I, who tells your life stories, makes plans, and remembers who you are each time you waken is temporarily suspended or just gone.

The Philosophical View

The ancient peeps weren’t happy with a mechanical answer. For them sleep wasn’t a rest, it was a return to something special.

In Advaita Vedanta (don’t study this subject if you scare easily) sleep is one of the three states of consciousness, waking, dreaming and deep sleep.

Deep sleep is the purest state with no ego running your story show, desire, suffering or illusions. It’s not unconsciousness in the way we think of it but more like consciousness without content or infra consciousness.

Where we see darkens, the mystics see presence.

Vedantic sages argue that in deep sleep, you return to the ground of being itself. Brahman, the infinite substratum of this reality.

You can’t remember it because memory requires ego and ego is not in this story. Something in you returns renewed or refreshed or should do as long as your sleep is not being loaded with cortisol due to high stress issues.

Similarly, in Zen Buddhism, deep sleep represents a state of mind free from concepts, judgments or attachment to things, a form of no-mind. Zen koans often point to this space!

Name your true face before your mom & dad were born, is one for example?

In deep sleep, that face, that pre-egoic awareness, might be the closest thing you touch to your original self or reality according to Zen, but zen is another teaching.

BUT where Did You Go?

So where do you go in deep sleep or unconsciousness?

You go nowhere, because the you that asks the question dissolves. It’s not that your gone like leaving your room, it’s that the room or the house, the entire idea of being inside or outside disappears.

You go everywhere, because you return to the wide-open field of consciousness beyond identity, beyond form and beyond your conceptual knowing.

You go backstage (like WordPress) where the lights of the day’s activity shuts off. No audience, no story or script, just pure stillness. The next morning the curtain lifts again, and you reappear with your lines, your habits, your worries, your name.

The Drop-Off Point

There’s something mystical about the moment just before deep sleep the so-called drop-off point. You are not awake, not dreaming and not fully asleep. Just hovering on that drifty edge. In some meditation traditions, this is considered a sacred window of opportunity, a moment when the ego relaxes its grip and the subconscious takes over. It’s the doorway between the worlds or in my opinion states.https://www.opencollege.info/product/sleep-disorders-course/

If you can stay conscious as you pass through this gap (as trained meditators sometimes do), you might catch a glimpse of something, an awareness that exists prior to thinking, prior to memory, prior to you. The mind the baby has before labels/descriptions were created with an ego

This isn’t woo woo mysticism, it’s a deep experiential truth reported across cultures and centuries from those who go deep within.

Sleep, Death and the Return!

Sleep is often called a mini waking death, and this is not without reason. In both sleep and death, the self-vanishes, time collapses, and the world disappears. But sleep is merciful, it brings you back. Some fear sleep for this reasons, it can be for some people a phobia to sleep for fear of not returning and this fear is called somniphobia.

In that sense, every night you practice letting go. You rehearse what it means to not be alive and to then come back again. It’s the most universal spiritual act and we all do it whether we believe in anything or not, a trial run of dying.

So Where Do You Go?

You go into the pause. The space between your breaths. The silence beneath each thought.

Neurologically, your conscious processing takes a nap.

It’s a mystery that science can map but not explain.

Authors View

My personal view, from my meditation experience is that the real question isn’t where you go, but who is it that goes anywhere at all. According to many schools of Buddhism you’re actually returning to your real home, which lies outside of conceptual thinking.

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