March 5, 2025 - Reading time: 7 minutes

Every day our consciousness "shuts off" for an extended period. We do not see, hear, or feel. It is as if we enter another world. Upon waking, one might ask: Where have I been all this time? And if you wake someone abruptly in the night, they often struggle to recognize which world they are in.

Sleep is so ordinary that we seldom question its true nature. And when we do this, science is here to provide the explanation: Sleep is a time for our body's recovery, a phase for "memory consolidation," during which the brain processes and stabilizes experiences. But is this a complete answer? How can science explain something to which it has no direct access - our inner self?

If we accept the premise of natural selection, in which only the most adaptable organisms survive, sleep presents a paradox. For a biological being pursued by predators, being unconscious for hours is a severe disadvantage. Evolution should have favored those who can rest with little or no deep sleep. After millions of years, we might expect dominant species to be those that developed mechanisms to remain semi-alert during the restoration of their energy.

Yet, this is not the case. Higher-order animals and humans not only require deep sleep but also often lack a simple alarm mechanism to wake in response to danger - a function that would require minimal brain activity. Deep sleep demands complete mental disconnection from the waking world. This suggests that this phenomenon is far more fundamental to our existence than mere evolutionary advantage. We may even conclude that the place where our consciousness resides during sleep is entirely inconsistent with the material world perceived through our senses.

There must be a better reason why we are completely detached from this reality during deep sleep than just restoring our biological functions. Perhaps the world of atoms in spacetime is inherently incompatible with the inner state we transition into at night. We simply cannot interact with both realms at the same time.

If sleep is an absolute necessity for the body and brain to rest, then what is the purpose of dreams? Today, we understand them as mental constructs, infused with emotions and characterized by heightened brain activity. They are purely conceptual, so abstract that they cannot be explained through visual representation. Dreams can only be experienced within our inner self. This elusiveness makes them an enduring mystery to experts.

Prevailing scientific theories suggest that dreams help consolidate and analyze memories. But if they were merely a byproduct of data processing, why would the brain generate such elaborate, symbolic, and emotionally charged experiences? If dreams were simply fragments of past events, they should primarily consist of recent memories - yet this is rarely the case.

Dreaming is also a highly energy-intensive process. Brain activity is high during dreaming, particularly during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep stage when most dreaming occurs when it exhibits high-frequency brain waves. If it were just an unintended side effect of memory consolidation, it would be one of nature's most inefficient mechanisms. Moreover, the cognitive processes involved in dreaming are fundamentally different from our waking thought patterns. Dreams often lack a clear sense of time, structure, and cause-and-effect relationships. Instead, they unfold through symbols, emotions, and abstract narrative.

An average person experiences approximately 130,000 dreams in a lifetime yet remembers only a tiny fraction - primarily the most emotionally vivid ones. One of the rare individuals with exceptional dream recall was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung collected and analyzed approximately 1,300 of Pauli's dreams, using them to support his theories on archetypes - universal symbols rooted in the collective unconscious.

If dreams serve a vital function, why do we forget most of them? This presents a double paradox. First, the brain expends energy crafting detailed, symbolic experiences when it should be resting. Then, it discards nearly all of this information, causing us to forget upon waking. Moreover, the dreams we do remember are often unrelated to anything useful in daily life.

The conventional explanations for sleep and dreams are riddled with inconsistencies. Deep sleep renders consciousness completely inactive - a state difficult to explain through evolution alone. And dreams, with their symbolism, seem to serve no practical purpose within the physical world. Dreams cannot simply be a byproduct of memory consolidation, just as a new movie cannot merely be the result of compressing and transforming existing data on a computer.

What if we expend energy encoding new information while interacting with another realm - one that is an essential part of our existence? What if sleep is the moment when we connect with the unconscious, a subjective psychic reality beyond the constraints we face on this planet?

Our world, the one we live in, is vastly different from the realm of the psyche. Dreams are a gateway to a world of information that serves no function in time-dependent physical existence. Perhaps existing in this material world is unnatural for us. Humans possess a dual nature: a consciousness tied to the world we visit in sleep and a body that serves as a biological vessel, adapting to the physical environment. We are like divers exploring the ocean floor - requiring periodic returns to the surface to replenish our oxygen. Likewise, we must frequently return to a place fundamentally different from our waking reality.

The brain may involuntarily access fragments of new information during sleep, with dreams emerging as the result of translating this symbolic data into constructs our waking mind can comprehend. Are we unintentionally tapping into a greater resource, sending and receiving information? This could explain the heightened brain activity observed during dreaming. Acting as a bridge between two worlds, the brain has the capacity to interact with both - yet no physical boundaries need to be crossed.

We do not yet know the full truth, but we do know that sleep and dreams open a gateway to an informational reality beyond the physical world. This realm is an intrinsic part of us - our true home. We must return to it often to consolidate the inner self and prepare for the day ahead on this planet.

This inner reality is so vastly different from the universe of atoms, animated by time, that any attempt to interpret it through our familiar concepts is destined to fail. But there is no need to try. We are here only briefly before the current of time carries us back to where we came from - to a moment where time itself defies definition, to a place where distance holds no meaning and information exists independent of matter. To a reality beyond the limits of our imagination.

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This is a full transcript of the video https://youtu.be/h6jCAw9d5so?si=q0K9rmmm08P6613j created by the DesignedWorld YouTube team using the book "The Designed World of Information: Unveiling the Incredible Realm Beyond", by Dr. Sergei V. Chekanov, 466 pages, ISBN: 9798990642836; Hardcover 9798990642843, eBook ISBN 9798990642829; Book webpage: https://ermislean.org/designed-world/