Sleep baffles me. Not because I struggle with it—though some nights I do, lying in my room in Tirana, staring at the ceiling while the city quiets outside my window. Sleep baffles me because after decades of research, billions spent on studies, and countless nights measured in laboratories, we still don't know what it is.
Think about that for a second. A third of your life vanishes into a state so fundamental that every creature with a nervous system does it, and we can't explain it. We've mapped the human genome, photographed black holes, and sent robots to Mars. But sleep? Sleep remains our longest blind stretch.
The Planet Sleeps (Whether We Like It or Not)
Picture Earth from space right now. At this exact moment, roughly two billion humans are unconscious, horizontally arranged, temporarily disconnected from reality. Add every other sleeping creature—elephants standing in African darkness, penguins taking four-second microsleeps in Antarctic colonies, octopuses changing colors in their dreams—and you're looking at a half-asleep planet.
We rarely think about sleep this way. Sleep feels private, individual, locked inside our skulls. The scientific establishment treats it the same way: as a problem of the individual-who-sleeps, a lone person trapped in an endless cycle of debt repayment. You stay awake, you accumulate sleep pressure, you pay it back by sleeping. The metaphor of burning a candle at both ends persists because it feels true.
But what if that's backward?
What if sleep isn't primarily for you at all?
The Strangeness We've Normalized
Here's what we know: sleep meets no single, satisfying definition. The 19th-century physician Robert MacNish called it "the intermediate state between wakefulness and death." Alexander Philips Wilson Philip went further, suggesting death is simply permanent sleep—a view apparently still popular among gravestone inscription writers. "She fell asleep, aged 84."
Modern criteria for defining sleep include immobility, horizontal posture, elevated arousal threshold, rapid reversibility. Yet each criterion crumbles under scrutiny. Plants sleep without nervous systems. Our hearts and lungs work continuously but show sleep-like rhythms. Dolphins and seals sleep with half their brain at a time. Penguins accumulate sleep in four-second bursts throughout the day.
Where does that leave us?
I'm sitting here in my wheelchair, writing this at my desk in Albania, and I realize: the boundary between waking and sleeping is as blurry as the boundary between who I was before my accident and who I am now. We like clean categories. Reality rarely cooperates.
When Your Brain Sleepwalks Through Consciousness
The research gets stranger. Studies show parts of your brain can sleep while you're technically awake. Scientists call this "local sleep"—individual neural networks winking out independently while you walk around, make decisions, drive cars. Conversely, during sleep, chunks of your brain remain active, processing, responding to the world you think you've disconnected from.
Sleepwalkers perform elaborate actions—cooking meals, having sex, committing murder—without awareness or memory. The legal system invented "forensic sleep medicine" to handle these cases. If you kill someone while genuinely asleep, you're not guilty of murder. Your body acted, but "you" weren't home.
This fascinates me on a personal level. Living with limited mobility forces you to reconsider agency and intention. When my body won't do what my mind commands, when the disconnect between consciousness and physical action becomes tangible, daily reality—I understand something profound about the myth of unified selfhood. We're not single, coherent entities. We're colonies of competing processes, sometimes aligned, often not.
Sleep exposes this truth nightly.
The Slow Wave Paradox
Researchers measure "sleep depth" using slow waves—electrical patterns in the brain occurring roughly once per second during deep sleep. These waves correlate with disconnection from the outside world, that elevated arousal threshold everyone talks about. Knock on a sleeper's door during slow-wave sleep, and they probably won't hear you.
Except they will.
Their brain will register the sound, generate electrical responses, even produce additional slow waves synchronized to the knocking. They just won't remember it consciously. The perception remains subliminal. Your sleeping brain tracks reality while pretending not to.
Scientists now exploit this property, building "closed-loop" devices that detect slow waves and deliver precisely-timed auditory clicks or electrical pulses to enhance them. The idea: artificially deepen sleep, boost its restorative effects, potentially prevent dementia.
But here's my question (and I think it's the right question): If we don't know what sleep is, how can we be sure we're enhancing it correctly? We're manipulating a process we fundamentally don't understand, guided by metrics we've decided correlate with "good sleep" based on... what, exactly? The assumption that more slow waves equal better rest?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The Chemistry of Forgetting
Humanity has pursued chemical sleep manipulation since forever. Opium, that substance "possessing virtus dormitiva" in Molière's 1673 play. Benzodiazepines synthesized by Leo Sternbach, a Polish pharmacist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who gave us Valium—from Latin valere, "to be healthy." Billions of doses prescribed annually.
Valium and its relatives work by enhancing GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that quiets neural activity. Take enough, and you'll sleep. Sort of. Look closely at brain waves during drug-induced sleep, and they don't quite match natural sleep. Slow waves actually decrease under traditional hypnotics.
Newer drugs target orexin, a peptide whose absence causes narcolepsy. Block orexin receptors, depress the waking circuitry, promote slow waves—theoretically more "natural" sleep. But again: more natural according to which definition of natural? Sleep in a laboratory while wearing electrodes and consuming synthesized molecules isn't anyone's ancestral sleep pattern.
I'm not anti-medication. Living in a wheelchair teaches humility about human limitation and gratitude for medical intervention. I'm anti-certainty. Anti the narrative that we've cracked sleep's code when we've barely scratched its surface.
The Primal State Hypothesis
Here's an idea that genuinely stops me: what if sleep is our default state?
Researchers growing neurons in petri dishes—completely isolated from any brain context—observe something remarkable. The neurons rebuild connections spontaneously, form networks, and start generating synchronized electrical patterns resembling sleep or anesthesia. Not waking activity. Sleep.
Newborn brains, preterm infants, even animals early in development show similar patterns: regular bursts of activity punctuated by twitches, what scientists call "tracé discontinu." There's an entire website, Twitchsleep, documenting animals twitching during sleep—dogs, platypuses, aardvarks, humans.
The hypothesis: we evolved to exist primarily asleep, in a vegetal state, waking only when absolutely necessary for survival, then regressing to our ancestral, primal condition. Sleep isn't recovery from waking. Waking is a brief, expensive departure from sleep.
This resonates with me profoundly. Not because of any scientific training—I'm a blogger and cultural group president, not a neuroscientist—but because of how it inverts our assumptions. Modern culture treats wakefulness as the goal, productivity as virtue, sleep as inconvenient weakness. What if that's completely wrong? What if plants have it right, and we're the ones frantically, unnecessarily active?
The Measurement Problem
Science progresses by measuring things precisely. Sleep science measures brain waves, eye movements, muscle tone, respiration, heart rate. Researchers splice sleep into stages—N1, N2, N3, REM—each with defining characteristics. They calculate sleep efficiency, total sleep time, arousal index, slow-wave percentages.
But Bertrand Russell warned us in 1918: "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think."
Sleep resists precision. The very act of measuring sleep changes it. Put someone in a laboratory, attach electrodes to their scalp, surround them with cameras and sensors, and you've created an environment fundamentally unlike the caves where sleep evolved. Then we're surprised when laboratory sleep doesn't match sleep in the wild, when standardized conditions produce results that don't generalize.
Researchers comparing captive and wild animal sleep find drastic differences. The same elephant, jackdaw, or mouse adapts sleep timing and duration from day to day based on context. Environment matters. Safety matters. Company matters.
We treat sleep as a fixed biological program when it's actually exquisitely sensitive to everything around us.
The Broken Relationship
Sleep evolved over millions of years in darkness, silence, relative safety. Small bands of humans huddling in caves, surrounded by trusted family, the only sounds natural wind and water and animal calls. No artificial light. No digital devices. No alarm clocks. No mortgage anxiety or war footage or social media doomscrolling.
We've alienated ourselves from that context completely. Our sleep patterns developed for the Pleistocene, but we're demanding they function in a neon-lit, constantly-connected, perpetually-interrupted, digitally-distracted modern wasteland. Then we're shocked when sleep "breaks."
It's not broken. It's wildly out of sync with the environment it evolved for.
Living in Tirana after growing up in Rimini, moving from one context to another, adapting to new sounds and rhythms and cultural patterns—I understand environmental impact viscerally. Your body remembers where it comes from. Sleep remembers the caves.
The Privacy We're Surrendering
Sleep tracking technology proliferates rapidly. Smartwatches, rings, headbands, mattress sensors—all measuring your movements, breathing, heart rate, brain waves, uploading data to cloud servers, generating scores and recommendations about your sleep quality.
The companies promise insight and improvement. They deliver something else: the commodification of sleep, the transformation of our most private state into data product, the appearance of sleeping well mattering more than actually sleeping.
Carissa Véliz argues persuasively about privacy as a fundamental drive shared across species. Sleep represents ultimate privacy: withdrawal from surroundings, retreat into a dimension entirely our own, the opportunity to be genuinely left alone. Sleep deprivation as torture works precisely because it violates this fundamental need for private restoration.
Now we're voluntarily surrendering that privacy. Letting corporations monitor our most vulnerable state. Making decisions about when we're safe to drive based on unreliable algorithms interpreting our "deep sleep" percentage.
I worry we're losing something essential before we even understood what we had.
The Relational Future
Yet I remain optimistic. Not because I think we'll finally "solve" sleep—I don't think it's solvable in that sense—but because I believe we might learn to relate to it differently.
Sleep feels isolating. Lying awake at 3 AM, alone with worries and darkness and racing thoughts, everyone else presumably unconscious—it's profoundly lonely. But what if we could connect with other sleepless people scattered across our timezone? What if instead of tracking data, sleep technology created immersive experiences of collective rest?
Picture this: you can't sleep in Tirana. You put on a headset and suddenly you're virtually present with insomniacs in Rome, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles. Not talking, not performing, just... being there together. Watching each other gradually relax, drift off, return to that primal state. A collective effervescence of sleep.
No brain stimulation. No chemicals. No optimization. Just permission to sleep, supported by the awareness you're not alone.
Sleep is relational. Like friendship, like love, like all the things that make existence bearable. We evolved sleeping in groups, surrounded by family, the soft breathing of others reminding us we're safe enough to let go.
Maybe that's what we've lost most—not understanding of sleep mechanisms, but the social context that allowed sleep to happen naturally.
What I Believe Now
After absorbing this research, thinking through these questions, relating them to my own experience—here's what I believe:
Sleep isn't a problem requiring solution. It's not debt requiring repayment. It's not even primarily for individual benefit, though we benefit from it. Sleep is the planet's rhythm, the necessary withdrawal that creates space for others, the default state we evolved to inhabit most of our existence.
We don't need to enhance sleep. We need to stop preventing it. Stop flooding our environments with artificial light. Stop demanding continuous productivity. Stop treating wakefulness as morally superior. Stop measuring and optimizing and tracking every unconscious moment.
We need to let sleep happen.
Sitting here in Albania, far from where I started, living in a body that doesn't always cooperate with my intentions, I've learned something valuable: control is overrated. Acceptance is underrated. The things that matter most—connection, meaning, rest—resist optimization. They require surrender.
Sleep asks us to surrender nightly. To trust that disconnection won't destroy us. To believe morning will come. To accept our bizarre, evolutionary inheritance of spending a third of our lives unconscious.
That's not a bug. It's not something to fix or hack or biohack or life-hack.
It's perhaps the most human thing about us—this daily reminder that we're not separate, autonomous, fully-conscious agents, but animals embedded in rhythms larger than ourselves, connected to a half-asleep planet spinning through darkness, participating in something ancient and strange and still mostly mysterious.
Two billion people are sleeping right now. They don't know why. Neither do the scientists studying them. Neither do I.
And maybe that's exactly as it should be.
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