Is Sleep a recession merely from the state of Consciousness to the potential states of Sub- and Supra-consciousness? And do these two states alternate normally in the opposite halves of the brain, concurrently with the alternation of Day and Night? Night-blindness suggests such an alternation in the dual factors of Vision—which comprises the intrinsic faculty of Vision and the concrete function of visualising the external. Every concrete function normally wanes with the waning of Day.
Hence increasing drowsiness, passing into Sleep.
Morning and evening mentality differ greatly. Intellect, reason and physical activity are paramount during the day. Emotion and imagination intensify with the approach of night.
Is this an alternation in function of the Male and Female brain-hemispheres, coincident with the alternation of the dual luminaries of our earth—the positive, unchanging Dominant Sun; the changeful Moon, with her Recessive phases and her mystical influences upon Life and Mind? The ante-natal life of the embryo is set in terms of lunar months. The word "lunatic" expresses the effects of lunar phases on persons of unstable mentality.
Whence do we derive our daily influx of Life? Though we have sunk to rest with dissolution in our bones, we awake re-charged with powers of living—a phenomenon for which Science has no explanation.
Life does not originate in vital processes; vital processes originate in Life. Do we, in sleep, when processes have exhausted our daily influx of Life-power, recruit this again from a psychical source? Are living processes the wick of a lamp which is filled with the Spirit of Life at each recurring dawn, spent by the day's endeavour, and re-filled again with the following dawn?
Failure of sleep kills more swiftly than starvation. And drug-insensibility will not preserve life unless natural sleep supervene.
If nervous energy is a complex form of electrical energy, then the brain in which this is stored is an electrical dynamo. Is this dynamo re-charged during sleep from some Occult Power-station?
Since, in every equation of Science, an unknown factor reveals itself, why not candidly confess this to be a Spiritual factor?