Imagine falling asleep, but instead of sinking into unconsciousness, a quiet awareness remains. Not a dream, but a quiet awareness with no content. For some people, this unusual state of consciousness offers a glimpse into what it really means to be awake and could challenge everything science thinks it knows about awareness.
For centuries, Eastern contemplative traditions have explored this phenomenon. The Indian philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta, based on the ancient Vedas, calls deep sleep or sushupti a state of just awareness, where one remains conscious without any specific thoughts or sensations. Similarly, Dzogchen teachings in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism describe meditative practices that allow practitioners to recognize the essence of consciousness even during sleep.
One such practice is dream yoga, or luminosity yoga, which trains people to notice the states of dreaming and deep sleep. The goal is a state of pure awareness being awake inside sleep without thoughts, images, or even a sense of self.
For Western science, this state is puzzling. How can someone be aware without being aware of something? Traditional theories often assume consciousness is always directed at an object: a laptop, the blue sky, or one’s own breath. The existence of objectless sleep experiences pushes researchers to rethink these assumptions.
Exploring Objectless Sleep Experiences
Researchers conducted studies to understand what a content-free state during sleep feels like. An online survey of 573 people explored unusual sleep experiences, including minimal forms of sleep consciousness like awareness after a dream ends or simply knowing that one is asleep.
In follow-up interviews with 18 participants, using detailed micro-phenomenological methods, researchers identified objectless sleep experiences. These are conscious states that appear to have no object of awareness. Participants described episodes during sleep with no sensory content, only the awareness that they were conscious.
Some experiences mirrored descriptions from Eastern traditions: objectless and selfless, with no sense of “I.” Participants reported their sense of self dissolving, akin to the ego dissolution seen with the psychedelic DMT or deep meditation. Others felt a faint presence in an undefined state, or a sense of nothingness or a void. A few experienced rudimentary dream-like sensations, a sense of being in a world that was strangely incomplete.
Interestingly, these experiences weren’t limited to those familiar with contemplative practices like dream yoga. The survey found no strong link between meditative practice and objectless sleep experiences, though lucid dreaming realizing you are dreaming while still asleep was somewhat correlated. Not everyone who could lucid dream experienced objectless sleep, however.
Training for Lucid Sleep
Because objectless sleep experiences are rare, studying them is challenging. Researchers tested a new method combining meditation, visualization, and lucid dreaming techniques. Four participants learned to remain aware while falling asleep and to signal lucidity with pre-agreed eye movements.
Portable EEG recordings confirmed that some objectless states occurred during non-REM (slow-wave) sleep. Non-REM sleep is usually thought to lack complex consciousness, though simpler sleep experiences, including minimal forms of dreaming, may still occur.
Why This Matters
Understanding objectless sleep could reveal fundamental truths about consciousness itself. It offers a window into awareness without sensory input or thought, challenging long-held assumptions and bridging ancient wisdom with modern science. These rare experiences could help researchers answer one of the most profound questions: what it truly means to be conscious.
