Forget everything your Sunday school teacher told you. “God invented sleep so we could rest.” Rest? How delightfully basic. A cosmic nap? Please. That’s the story we tell the children and the perpetually caffeinated. The truth, my friends, is far more wickedly spiritual and, frankly, much more embarrassing for the human race.
God didn’t invent sleep to rest our weary bones; He invented it to make us stop being so disgustingly human for a few hours.
The Great Fast: A Nightly Autophagy of the Soul
The real genius of sleep is that it’s the one thing that forces us to stop. Stop talking, stop running, and most importantly, stop feeding. Oh, you think I’m talking about that midnight snack? Adorable. I’m talking about the spiritual, psychic, and emotional vampirism that constitutes the human condition.
God saw us: lying, hating, plotting, backstabbing, draining energy from our neighbors with our drama, our gossip, our relentless need. He knew a direct commandment wouldn’t work—we’d just find a loophole. So, He gave us sleep: a compulsory, nightly, self-imposed fast.
Science, in its well-meaning but slightly dull way, calls this autophagy—the body eating its own damaged cells. I call it the Great Soul Cleanse. For those precious hours, you are physically incapable of committing the seven deadly sins of interpersonal offense.
- You can’t lie to your boss.
- You can’t hate your irritating in-law.
- You can’t scheme against your rival.
You are forced, by divine biological mandate, to subsist on your own self. You are your own food source, your own spiritual battery charger. You are finally, blissfully, self-contained. The hunger that makes a “hungry man an angry man” is utterly silenced, not by food, but by the ultimate self-sufficiency. You literally eat your own anger.
The Dream State: Flying Without a Ticket
And what a glorious, humiliating thing sleep is! It is the only time man can truly achieve everything he pretends to seek during the day, without any of the earthly nonsense.
We spend our waking lives obsessed with acquisition: tickets, money, status, power. Yet, in sleep, we master the impossible for free:
- You leap without jumping.
- You fly in your dreams without buying a ticket.
- You converse with the cosmos without opening your pretentious self-help book.
Sleep is God’s ultimate satire on our striving. It proves that the most profound human experiences are not achieved through effort, but received through surrender. We become our most powerful, most unbound selves only when we shut down the engine of ambition.
The Permanent Nap: The Rest in Peace Protocol
And the ultimate punchline? The final, glorious destination of this enforced nightly practice is Death.
They say the only true constant is change. But I give you a better one: 100 percent of the time, one person is asleep on planet Earth. Every second, every time zone, one human soul is practicing.
Death is merely the moment when the practice becomes permanent. The body, having finally learned the lesson of self-containment, is now dead. But the mind—the restless, needy, yearning part—is finally, fully freed from the burden of having to feed off the world.
It is the final, perfect fast. We don’t say “Go Get ‘Em” or “Hustle Hard” to the departed. We say, with a profound understanding of the liberation: “Rest in Peace.”
Because now, they are finally, eternally, at home with themselves.
Author: abijohn.com