Our consciousness leaves us behind when we fall asleep. The part of us that we associate with us in some capacity is gone when once our head hits that pillow. And yet very few people are concerned by this.

But what if it’s not you coming back that next morning? To understand this question we need to first understand what “you” is.

A large part of my view on what the self is comes from the book “ The Power of Unwavering Focus” by Dandapani. The author describes our conscious selves to simply be our attention, more specifically where our attention is in our mind. An analog he draws is our attention being a ball of light in a dark house (the house being our mind) illuminating different rooms.

So if we take this perspective at face value, we can start to understand where we go when we sleep. It must be wherever our attention goes! This view leads me to two more thoughts:

- When we don’t dream, is the recursive system that generates what we call our attention dissolved? If so, how does it regenerate in the morning?

Let’s tackle these separately.

What’s the deal with dreaming:

I recently had a dream that Russia sent two nuclear bombs to the U.S. and I got to watch them fall to the ground. 

During this experience I remember emotions being experienced, and some thoughts on how to survive running through my mind. Seeing that there was a sense of agency and self, I think it’s safe to consider the conscious experience of dreaming equivalent to regular waking consciousness.