VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Steve|DATE|1366710710|CONTENT|I’m with Simon on this one. His personal tragedy is awful, but this is not about that - he didn&#039;t have to mention it at all in a discussion on sleep. This is about his foot-in-the-door religious argument. (We don’t know precisely what sleep is for, Madam, so can I possibly interest you in god as a handy explanatory tool. It can also be used for consciousness, love and your appendix, with no extra pieces required, and you’ll find it’s excellent at removing hard-to-shift stains).

All animals sleep, which could mean that sleep is vital to complex life, or that it was important to our common ancestor and not sufficiently detrimental over the intervening millennia. There are some interesting experiments about information processing that seem to suggest a function for sleep, allowing the brain to process the day&#039;s data while the animal is in as secure a place as it can be. There is an adaptive argument also, that animals became suited to either light or dark, and therefore were better off hiding somewhere quiet when at their least effective (this doesn&#039;t explain snoring). It is clear that, whatever the original reason behind it, animals currently need sleep. From my own experience I know that I’m in no position to properly fight off a bear attack when I’ve forgotten to turn my alarm off at the weekend.

All interesting stuff. But then there is the complicated theological question of why a god that doesn’t need sleep had his physical incarnation require sleep. I can only offer two possible explanations:

1. Jesus slept because at a deeper level sleep allows us to experience that state of being under which that essential part of us that is beyond our physical manifestation can in some way come into contact with the suffusing warmth of that essence which is in some way outside of our experience of wakefulness which at a deeper level can in some way… (sorry, I nodded off).

2. Jesus slept because he was an ordinary human being, so why wouldn’t he? (See also, why Jesus had to eat, why Jesus got angry, why Jesus felt pain, why Jesus picked his toes, etc.)|IP-ADDRESS|10.0.119.138, 217.36.222.79, 10.37.37.201|MODERATIONFLAG|