I’ve been thinking lately about dreamless sleep. Not the dreaming state, but the period where nothing at all is experienced. I think that state has something important to tell us about death.
Most people who don’t believe in an afterlife fear death because they fear “annihilation”: the idea of becoming nothing, of there being nothing after. Yet, when we look at it rationally, that fear relies on a strange assumption: that there will still be someone there to experience the nothingness. In other words, it asks us to imagine ourselves existing in a state where we cannot exist, which is paradoxical.
Dreamless sleep is the closest thing we know to genuine non-experience. When we wake from it, we don’t remember darkness, absence or being in “nothingness”. We are aware only of a discontinuity: one moment we are awake at night, the next we are awake in the morning. The interval itself is not experienced at all.
This shows that non-experience cannot be experienced. The fear of annihilation depends on imagining ourselves enduring nothingness, but dreamless sleep demonstrates that nothingness is not an experience in the first place. It cannot be feared, it cannot be remembered and it cannot exist as a conscious state. It is a kind of absolute neutrality, beyond the reach of thought or sensation.
Interestingly, we already practice “dying” every night when we sleep. We lie down, let go of control and allow consciousness to dissolve, without fearing annihilation. In sleep, we surrender ourselves to a state of non-experience that is nonetheless essential to life.It is a small rehearsal for what awaits us at the end of life, a reminder that the cessation of awareness is not inherently terrifying.
This does not, of course, remove all the fears surrounding death. We feel sadness at leaving loved ones behind, regret unfulfilled ambitions and have anxiety about the process of dying itself. These fears are understandable because they belong to the living mind: to consciousness that cares, hopes and remembers. But it does remove the specific terror of annihilation: the imagined torment of being trapped in nothingness. That fear only arises if we assume that non-experience could somehow be experienced, which is a logical impossibility.
Viewed this way, death is not an experience waiting for us at the end of life. It is the end of experience itself. What troubles us belongs to the living mind, on this side of consciousness. Beyond that, there is nothing: no fear, no awareness, only the absence of both. And perhaps that is not something to fear, but something profoundly simple: a return to dreamless sleep, which we pass through each night.
