A. Once I spent quite some time thoroughly looking into sleep and my apparent attachment to it. This proved to be quite a difficult experience to clarify, simply because whatever else may be at play in our relationship with sleep, sleep is also nature’s way of keeping us alive and healthy – so it’s also beyond any attachment we may develop towards it. In some ways it is similar to our relationship with sex. Most of us are driven to want sex at sometime or other because it’s nature’s way of propagating the species and therefore needs to seen as natural. But we can also over-identify with what is natural by hijacking nature’s way and pouring our emotional insecurities, fears and loneliness into the experience, making it ‘mine’, which then takes our desires way beyond the ‘natural’ urge. I think the same principle applies to sleep.

The example you give clearly shows that your desire for sleep is likely a way of avoiding something emotional that you are finding difficult to experience. You are choosing to avoid whatever it is by losing consciousness. Your natural need to sleep seems to have been hijacked by a subtle unconscious desire to avoid something about yourself. Being a practitioner, if I were to have this sort of experience, I would get into the habit of not giving into that desire to crash out during such experiences, but rather stay awake and learn to open to whatever it is that is difficult. We are creatures of habit and conditioning; learn to break that habit and by doing so you will learn something about yourself that could be very valuable.