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You are still conscious during sleep, but you usually aren't forming memories. The word "unconscious" (meaning nonresponsive) and "consciousness" (as a metaphor
by banned_man 18y ago
You are still conscious during sleep, but you usually aren't forming memories. The word "unconscious" (meaning nonresponsive) and "consciousness" (as a metaphor for "mind" in the Buddhist sense, subjective experience, or "soul") shouldn't be connected because they refer to entirely different phenomena.
With practice in mindfulness meditation, you can remain aware in the early stages of sleep, and form memories nonetheless. It can actually be jarring, because you experience with full awareness the paralysis, the strange pains/zaps (that are actually harmless). If you get good at it, you can pop into a lucid dream (sometimes) or follow the mind into fairly deep levels of sleep... though it's debated whether or not awareness in Stage IV sleep is possible.
- joeyo 18y agoPerhaps we should now define our terms very carefully, I am using the word consciousness to refer to the state of having a subjective experience. So states without a subjective experience-- sleep or anesthesia or death-- are unconscious. Do you disagree? It's not at all clear to me that you can have subjective experiences while you are asleep. Usually dreams are considered a subjective experience and this is interpreted to mean that you experience a dream, and upon waking you remember that experience. But consider this alternative hypothesis: There is random brain activity during sleep, but no subjective experience of it. Upon awakening, the brain has to make sense of this nonsense activity and shoves it all into memory. This is, in a way, a "false memory". Thus you wake up and "remember" a dream that you did not experience.