Sleep is Painless?

[sdi]

I was following up on a reference I came across to Plutarch, a part of which reads, "therefore death is sometimes accompanied by pains, sleep always by pleasure."

Is it a common belief that sleep is free of pain? It is not my experience: some of the worst pain I have experienced has been in dreams; for example, of being shot by a firearm.

Comments

[jprussell]

Ah, okay, that's helpful context. In that case, might he argue that the "pain" experienced in a dream is experienced not by your body but by your soul?

[sdi]

I think he would argue that what I experienced is impossible! :) Hence my question, is my experience unusual? I had assumed it to be pretty normal—don't people have nightmares of being embarrassed, torn to pieces by wild animals, etc.?

The Neoplatonic perspective, at least, is that the thing experiencing dreams is the "pneumatic vehicle" (what occultists call the astral body), which is not the soul itself but still a body of sorts (even if it's different from the physical body), and thus has sensory capacity. This, at least, fits my experiences!

[jprussell]

Ah, okay. Hmmm, I can't remember feeling physical pain in a dream, and in fact I've had some dreams where things seem to twist themselves so that the thing that obviously should have hurt me doesn't. I have felt embarrassment, grief, and other "negative" emotions in dreams, at times pretty strongly, though.