Many of us track how well we sleep during the night. How many minutes of REM, how many minutes of deep sleep, light sleep, our heartrate, oxygen levels, etc. We then derive meaning from those numbers; we transmute a quantity into a quality. In this case, the higher our score for deep sleep or REM, the better we’ve slept. One might wonder how any of us knew we’d had a good night’s sleep before these tools were available. We could argue that having to tune into ourselves to know how well we’ve slept is a skill we probably don’t want to lose. Nevertheless, the best aspect of this tracking is the inescapable realization that sleep is essential to our overall health.
What these sleep numbers cannot tell us is an infinitely larger topic. Questions we could ponder: Why is the sleep state such an effective way to be healthy? What are we doing during this time when we are unconscious? What else, if anything, do we acquire from our time spent unconsciousness each night?
In previous posts, we have discussed what the soul and spirit (the astral body and ego) experience during sleep while our physical and etheric bodies stay behind. (See August through November 2019 posts.)
Today, Dr. Steiner points out an especially interesting outcome of sleep: its ability to transform the learning experiences of our waking lives into capacities that help us navigate our lives later on. Thus, the more we learn on a daily basis, the more abilities we will have at our disposal as we mature.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
In the course of his life man develops from one stage to another… How does this development proceed in everyday life?
Sleeping and waking play an essential part. When we think of the daily experiences man has in his youth in connection with learning and picture how these experiences are transformed into faculties, we must turn our minds to the condition of sleep which alone makes this transformation possible.
Every night on going to sleep our souls take with them something from daily life; what we take with us—the fruit of our experiences—is transformed during sleep in such a way that it becomes our abilities and capacities. To take a concrete example: What efforts we were obliged to make day after day when we were young, in order to learn to write! But we are not in the least aware of those past experiences when we take up a pen today to give expression to our thoughts. All our earlier efforts to shape the letters have been transformed into the capacity to write. The power which has transformed all these daily experiences into the faculty of writing is actually present in the depths of the soul but can operate only when we ourselves are not consciously there.
From this we may conclude that in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life. Forces higher than those available in our conscious life become active during sleep; experiences are transformed into faculties, and the soul becomes more and more mature. A deeper being is working within us at our further development; when we go to sleep, this being receives the day’s experiences and remolds them, so that in a later period of life they are at our disposal in the form of faculties.
But we bring out of sleep much more than we ourselves brought into it through our conscious experiences. During the day we use up forces by participating in what is going on around us. In the evening, we feel fatigue because these forces are exhausted, and during sleep they are replenished; many forces flow into us during the night other than those we have acquired as the result of our daily activity. Our life during sleep is therefore the source of innumerable forces we need for waking life.
Excerpt from: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Lecture Four: Faculties of the Human Soul and Their Development by Rudolf Steiner. Vienna. March 24, 1910.
To repeat a line in the above excerpt, Steiner says, “…in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life.” This is something we should be infinitely curious about. We can see that the numbers alone don’t tell us much. We can see that even though sleep is something we all do, it is still a mystery to most of us. We shouldn’t be satisfied knowing only that the number denoting the hours we’ve slept is a reason to pat ourselves on the back. The better health sleep provides points to something much deeper and more profound. We should want to know more.
Each of us is the only one who can live our individual life. We alone give our life purpose and meaning. We alone are responsible for our own evolution as a human being. All the numbers by themselves will never, ever give us relevant information about the soul capacities we have obtained in sleep.
To begin with, we can cultivate a sense of gratitude that sleep is provided for us. When we try to imagine learning without developing any capacities or living without replenishing our resources, we can be humbled by the blessing of this daily gift.
And we can really infuse the words we say at day’s end. “Good night. Sleep well.”