Dissociation And Sleep

To be awake, a being must be conscious.  They are perceiving, experiencing their thoughts along with any sensory experiences applicable.  To dream, one must also be conscious.  Unconsciousness in the sense of not being aware of one's bodily surroundings is not the same as true unconsciousness.  A dream entails mental imagery and perhaps even mental audio, so it cannot be experienced apart from a consciousness that is actively perceiving.  What a dream cannot genuinely feature is physical sensations because the mind has retreated away from the senses for sleep to ever arrive; even when awake, it is not as if one can know if sights and sounds are mental correspondents with external things or exclusively within the mind because it is logically possible for these stimuli to be purely mental, rather than being external physical realities (a chair one sees a few feet away) or caused by material substance (a sound coming from a radio).

As I elaborate upon here, there is only one way to know if one is awake or dreaming, as difficult as it can be to identify it [1].  A person otherwise is assuming, is ignoring the issue, or has not discovered all of these very precise truths despite making no assumptions and looking to the inherent truth of logic.  What of a case, however, where a person is on their way to falling into slumber, yet they have not actually become asleep?  Not entirely unlike someone who focuses so intently on their work that background noise fades entirely out of immediate perception, their mind distances its focus from all sensory stimuli to the point that it is shut out of conscious awareness.  They are also not necessarily imagining anything, recalling anything, or thinking about any aspect of any matter.

It might seem rather ambiguous experientially (it is only subjective perception, not logical necessities, that can be epistemologically ambiguous) because a person is so dissociated at this point that they might not directly be thinking anything at all, not even passively seeing mental imagery.  At the same time, they would have to be awake since they have not yet fallen into actual sleep.  It might even suddenly seem to them like they were not asleep a few moments ago if an abrupt noise shakes them out of the dissociation, if they recall anything of the previous moments at all.  While in this state, however, there would be experience of such a passive nature or to such an extreme degree of dissociation that a person is oblivious to even the self-evidence of logical axioms and their own existence.

Now, no matter if someone perceives anything at all or rationalistically knows how to prove they are awake/still awake if they were actively thinking (again, see [1]), they can only either be awake or asleep.  There is no other possibility whatsoever.  It is not that there is sleep, the status of being awake, and a third, hybrid state that is in between the other two.  Just as someone can only be phenomenologically or biologically dead or alive at a specific moment, though they could be in the process of dying at a given time, a person is either asleep or awake.  This is a logical necessity and not a scientific truth.  That is, it is a matter of pure reason that there are no other metaphysical options, and thus someone can know this apart from the regular experience of going to sleep and reawakening.

The condition of extreme dissociation while awake and approaching the border of sleep simply exemplifies an unusual metaphysical status, one where dissociation is so strong that a person could be conscious on one level, in that their mind has not truly retreated within itself away from the senses and bodily experience (something only possible due to the truth of mind-body dualism), and yet they are not thinking or perceiving anything.  They are not dead, not phenomenologically or biologically asleep, and also not consciously thinking.  At least dreaming still involves consciousness that is not only in existence, but also that actively perceives!  Such a narrow range of scenarios of this kind are logically possible.

Their mind still exists and yet is not known in this duration--for they are not actually thinking in order to grasp the objective, intrinsically necessary truths of logic that illuminate other matters like introspection, which a rationalist has absolute certainty of.  Alongside dreamless sleep, this sort of state is the only one in which a person can exist as a conscious being but be unaware of anything at all: to dissociate like this means there is no grasping any passive sensory stimuli that cannot be proven to exist outside the mind (with one exception; yet again, see [1]), no exploration of their own mind itself, and not even any direct reflection on the logical truths that do not depend on the mind and that are needed to know its presence and nature to begin with.  Even non-rationalists, who do not know or acknowledge the metaphysically inherent truths of reason and their epistemological self-evidence, at least experience their own mind when awake or dreaming, despite only believing in assumptions regarding them.  A person this dissociated is conscious but ironically cannot be conscious of it!

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html