What do we owe to the sleeping self?

We spend 26 years of our lives, on average, asleep. Imagine that you know with some confidence that when you sleep on your back, you will have pleasant dreams, sleeping on your stomach will yield unpleasant dreams and sometimes nightmares, and sleeping on your side doesn’t really affect anything. If fully remembered, we can say these dreams would give you +10, -10, and 0 utility respectively. Suppose also that it was hard for you to fall asleep on your back, falling asleep on your stomach was quite easy, and falling asleep on your side was somewhere between the two. Similar to dream utility, we can call these experiences -1, +1, and 0 respectively. Let’s also ignore any health effects of sleeping position for now. How would you decide how to fall asleep?

For most of us, we would probably not consider the dreaming utility whatsoever. Dreams are scare remembered, so why even bother? After all, if you remember 1 out of every 20 dreams (what I learned is called “Dream Recall Frequency”), then the long-term utility of a night of good dreams is not +10, but +.5, which is outweighed by the -1 you received from the difficulty of falling asleep. Dreams also fade quickly from memory, meaning we discount any suffering that we do carry into the rest of our day from a terrible dream. Further, dreams aren’t the same as real life, and we therefore discount them against things that happen in the waking stage, such as the difficulty of falling asleep.

Piglet sleeping greatly elevates my wellbeing

But none of this really holds up to scrutiny. Take the objection of not remembering our dreams well and so discounting it against things which we do remember. In another example, a patient with some type of severe amnesia, who cannot tell you what happened 3 minutes ago, is still worthy of being treated well and avoiding needless suffering. If there were such a patient who was at some risk of danger - say a hot stove that they forgot they turned on - we wouldn’t be morally sanctified by simply saying “well, they won’t remember it, so it doesn’t really matter.” In fact, we may be more morally culpable for the avoidable suffering brought upon someone with such a condition.

Or take the fact that dreams aren’t real and so shouldn’t take precedence over real experiences. Imagine someone who has a condition where they imagine horrifying specters haunting them during their waking hours. This is real suffering, even if the thing causing the suffering comes from the imagination. Dreams affect the sleeping self in the same way - the sleeping self (as far as I can tell) genuinely believes that all of the occurrences of a dream are genuine.

You may say “well, all of this wellbeing and suffering is happening to me, so I am the one who should get to decide!” but this fails to incorporate that your amnesic sleeping self cannot speak up for itself, and it’s needs are outweighed by the conscious chooser when making sleep choices.

I hope I’ve established that the sleeping self can, in fact, suffer or experience great pleasure and wellbeing. In fact, I might argue that the sleeping self experiences more heightened phenomena than the waking self; some nightmares I’ve had have been more horrific than anything I have experienced in real life, and some of my best dreams are significantly elevated above many of my happiest memories. If all this is true, it seems we owe something to the sleeping self. If, in the example from the beginning of this blog, you could greatly increase the wellbeing of a stranger by simply sleeping on your back, it would be pretty repugnant of you to not do so. Similarly, it seems, we owe it to the sleeping self to sleep on our back.

I’ll be honest here that I got thinking about this because it is my experience. Weirdly, when I sleep on my back I have pleasant dreams, I have dreams that are neither here nor there when sleeping on my side, and negative dreams when falling asleep on my belly. It is also hardest for me to fall asleep on my back and so on. For me, this means I need to be falling asleep on my back as much as I can, as I sort of owe it to my sleeping self to do so. But I imagine this is not the case for most people. So instead imagine a pill was produced that guaranteed that you would A) have exclusively wonderful dreams and B) you would not remember any of these dreams. To me, it is essential that you take the pill. In fact, it is morally incumbent on you to take it even if there is some cost to it. Where does this cost lie? I suppose it primarily depends on your financial situation and what else that money could be doing to achieve positive states of wellbeing elsewhere.

That is for you to ponder and decide. As for me, I will be sleeping on my back as much as I am able.