Where Does Consciousness Go When We Lose It?

Every night, something rather extraordinary happens.

We lie down, close our eyes and, at some point, our ordinary waking consciousness disappears. Hours later, it returns.

But where did it go?

The obvious answer is that we were asleep. Yet sleep complicates the idea that consciousness simply switches off.

Sometimes we wake with vivid memories of dreams: places, conversations, emotions and entire worlds that seemed completely real while we inhabited them. Sometimes we wake knowing that we were dreaming, yet the content has already disappeared. And sometimes there appears to have been nothing at all – an apparent gap between falling asleep and waking.

But does not remembering an experience mean that there was no experience to remember?

Research into dreaming suggests the relationship between consciousness, sleep and memory is considerably more complicated. Dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, and researchers distinguish between recalled dreams, experiences that appear to have occurred but whose content cannot be recalled, and reports of no experience at all.

This raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps during some periods of sleep it isn’t consciousness itself that disappears, but our ability to form, retain or retrieve memories of conscious experience.

And then there is the equally strange business of waking.

However deep our sleep, we normally open our eyes with an immediate sense that we have returned. We don’t wake believing that yesterday’s person ceased to exist and somebody new has taken their place. There is a remarkable continuity of self across hours for which we may have no conscious memory whatsoever.

What creates that continuity?

And if consciousness can apparently emerge from the darkness of sleep each morning, another question follows: where did it emerge from in the first place?

At what point during human development does consciousness begin?

Is there a moment during development in the womb when experience first becomes possible? Does consciousness emerge gradually as the nervous system develops? Does birth itself represent an important transition? Or does what we later recognise as consciousness require further development after birth?

These remain difficult and contested questions.

They also connect with the work of transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, whose research into non-ordinary states of consciousness led him to propose that experiences associated with intrauterine life and birth can leave profound psychological imprints. His concept of the Basic Perinatal Matrices placed the stages of biological birth within a much broader model of human experience.

Grof’s interpretation remains controversial, particularly where experiences reported later in life are understood as relating to birth or prenatal existence. But the questions raised by this work remain fascinating.

What counts as an experience before we possess language, autobiographical memory or even the developed sense of self through which we understand our lives today?

Perhaps consciousness is not simply something that is either present or absent.

Every night we cross a boundary between different forms of awareness, experience and memory -and every morning we cross back again.

Which leaves a deceptively simple question:

Where does consciousness begin, where does it go – and what makes it feel like the same consciousness when it comes back?