Sleep and dreaming in the afterlife

[JosephP]

Anyone have any opinion or sources on if sleep and dreaming continue after we are resurrected. I know there is little purpose to speculating on these kind of "mechanics of heaven" questions, but it's a curiosity.

[Finrock]

My thoughts are that sleeping and dreaming becomes a matter of willing it to occur if you so desire. Meaning, you aren't beholden to weakness but I see no reason why you would be restricted in doing things that aren't evil.

Regards,

Finrock

[JosephP]

My thoughts are that sleeping and dreaming becomes a matter of willing it to occur if you so desire. Meaning, you aren't beholden to weakness but I see no reason why you would be restricted in doing things that aren't evil.

Regards,

Finrock

I'll go with that as a good way to look at it. I was also wondering if any authorities had ever addressed it or even speculated on it.

[MrShorty]

Off the top of my head, the closest parallel I can think of is the incident described in Luke 24 where the resurrected Christ ate with the apostles. Commentary I've seen on this incident seems to universally agree that the Lord's resurrected body did not need to eat, but obviously still had the ability to ingest food. It seems reasonable to me to extend this thinking to sleep. Our resurrected bodies will not need sleep, but they may very well be capable of sleep. Our resurrected minds will not need to dream like they seem to now, but they may be capable of dreaming.

[Traveler]

I like the words in the song, "He that watches over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps." It is my opinion that sleep is a characteristic of our mortal experience.

The Traveler

[Vort]

Anyone have any opinion or sources on if sleep and dreaming continue after we are resurrected. I know there is little purpose to speculating on these kind of "mechanics of heaven" questions, but it's a curiosity.

Granted that it's silly speculation, useless at best...

I've wondered about that before. The scriptures suggest that a thousand years is as a day to God (2 Peter 3:8). As an adult, I have always taken this to be strictly figurative, but what if it's literal in some sense? That would make the scriptural idea of a seven-thousand-year earthly existence equivalent to one week. If we assume that God is not going to stay awake for an entire week (which, admittedly, might explain the destructions at the Second Coming...), he must have had some sleep periods, at least naps, in there. If he sleeps for eight heaven-hours, that corresponds to about 330 years. How would you like to live when God is sleeping? Of course, the scriptures also say that God neither sleeps nor slumbers, as I think someone has already pointed out.

Again, I assume this to be figurative, but in a literal sense I have no idea if God sleeps. I kind of think maybe not; why would he? Sleep appears to be an evolutionary adaptation to our day/night cycle and temperature fluctuations coming from that. We sleep to conserve energy during the energy-inefficient cold and dark part of the day. (Wikipedia disputes this theory.) There is a lot for to it than this, of course. The fact is that evolutionary biologists don't have a good handle on why we or other mammals (and also birds and some other vertebrates, even some fish) sleep.

It certainly does appear that sleep allows us to make connections between disparate things in our lives. Much of the miraculous genius and brilliance of human beings comes during or just before or after sleep, and I doubt that is mere coincidence.

I do think the question is unknowable at this stage and ultimately irrelevant to us, but sometimes I wonder, all the same.

[Guest gopecon]

Since we are speculating here, I'm with Traveler. Sleep is required because our bodies wear out and need to be rejuvenated. I don' think that will be an issue in our resurrected states.

[james12]

Speaking of the spirit world Brigham Young said, "You will there see that those spirits we are speaking of are active; they sleep not. And you will learn that they are striving with all their might—laboring and toiling diligently as any individual would to accomplish an act in this world." (Discourses of Brigham Young, 380)

[Guest ghostwind]

Granted that it's silly speculation, useless at best...

(...)

Again, I assume this to be figurative, but in a literal sense I have no idea if God sleeps. I kind of think maybe not; why would he? Sleep appears to be an evolutionary adaptation to our day/night cycle and temperature fluctuations coming from that. We sleep to conserve energy during the energy-inefficient cold and dark part of the day. (Wikipedia disputes this theory.) There is a lot for to it than this, of course. The fact is that evolutionary biologists don't have a good handle on why we or other mammals (and also birds and some other vertebrates, even some fish) sleep.

It certainly does appear that sleep allows us to make connections between disparate things in our lives. Much of the miraculous genius and brilliance of human beings comes during or just before or after sleep, and I doubt that is mere coincidence.

I do think the question is unknowable at this stage and ultimately irrelevant to us, but sometimes I wonder, all the same.

I think you're right. Only a few days without sleep we get paranoid and suffer from halluzinations. It's like nite shift in a data processing centre: all data have to be completed and results have to be provided for the next day. If there were too much unprocessed data, no results or knowledge could be provided. But it's not only our mental side that requires for sleep. Also our body (and our encephalon is part of our body ) and our physiological processes need some kind of a resting state (believe me, I was often enough drunk) to reduce poisonous substances... and perhaps poisonous thoughts... :lol:

Vort, don't you wonder why we always forget where we were "wandering" at night in our deepest dreams? Isn't there every morning and every awakening a new gift and a new start? ...

Edited February 6, 2013 by ghostwind
grammar

[Seminarysnoozer]

Vort, don't you wonder why we always forget where we were "wandering" at night in our deepest dreams? Isn't there every morning and every awakening a new gift and a new start? ...

You don't have to wonder too much. That part of our neuroanatomy has been fairly well established. Without conscious circuits on and whenever sleep circuits are on we lose memory of what just happened over the past several minutes. This is why when one is reading at night and they go "fishing" (bob the head forward) they may erase the memory of the last few paragraphs read. But as they go back through it recall that they have actually read it before. The short term memory circuits or active memory remains for a few minutes after waking so this is why we may remember parts of a dream but only if we wake from REM sleep. Simple thoughts or images can come from other stages of sleep. If a person wakes from REM and then doses in and out of sleep then the memory of the dream is not maintained. Remembering dreams does not contribute to ones health or well being even though sometimes if there is a change from what it was before, that could indicate a sleep disorder - either having more, vivid dreams or not having them when they were there before.

Also, someone else mentioned that we sleep because our bodies wear out (gepecon said that). That is not entirely true. Many researches have looked at some "sleep factor" that drives sleep and physical fatigue is not a huge contributing factor. Circadian rhythms are mostly driven by the transition of light, dark to light patterns in a 24 hour cycle. The natural rhythm of light is to have the lights start to go off 12 hours before they come on (like what happens in nature). That drives the depth of sleep way more than fatigue. The anatomy has been established with its affect on the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Also the brain uses almost as much energy at night as it does during the day. If it was "fatigue" then it would simply shut off during that time.