Sleep Revisited
What we think we achieved this far is to see sleep as a continuation of vital functions of the self in the period preceding birth, and to connect organically sleep and wakefulness by acknowledging their necessity in the process of living as an integrated individual within an environment which is variable, in some ways unpredictable, but must be coped with if life is to continue. The next section will add some precision to the above.
3 The Self And Its Two States Of Consciousness Already in the embryonic and fetal periods, the self had two essential functions: to produce the new structures and to see to it that they integrated the old ones by subordination. As this was taking place, duration after duration, and from the start, there was no discontinuity and most of us are born as integrated systems hierarchical in time and with the self in command. Through the nervous system the chain of command is established, and while the self consciously lives at its peak, it is to be found everywhere through the psyche and its vehicle, the integrated nervous system, descending from the hemispheres to the nervous endings found in every cell. The self is the only entity needed to account for the structuration and its maintenance. The soma is one of the forms the self took during the 9 months of its transformation of free available cosmic energy into the organized structures which are now locked-up energy. The psyche is another of its forms, less locked-up because it is available in surplus to connect to structures, to keep them performing that for which they had been created, a residual floating energy forming one whole by its continuity as the blood does (but this one needing the structure of the blood vessels to be taken everywhere). The psyche is the guardian of the work done by the self; it is a creature of the self as are the structures, but only takes over the functions when these have been created by the self to get hold of the new structures which together with the psyche form the integrated objectified self. The self is thus left free to move ahead creating other structures which, after birth, are no longer necessarily somatic.
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