AN INFORMATION THEORY OF LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS

Unconsciousness is more than just weird, it's unnerving. All of a sudden we're just gone for many hours at a time, left only with a sometimes improbable-seeming return ticket to awareness. We dream briefly (and only briefly), but otherwise sleep is mostly non-space, where the brain has decided to exclude you from the body's affairs. It's like autopilot, but you've been locked out of the cockpit. Consciousness itself remains a mystery in many respects scientifically speaking, and it's consciousness that determines this present/not-present sleep boundary. Then again I'm not so sure most of us think of sleep as the dissolution of consciousness so much as a switching on and off- or pausing- of it. To mix metaphors you're not locked out of the cockpit after all; it's just that the cockpit no longer exists.