It’s the season of “sleep in heavenly peace,” which to me has always meant finishing the dishes, leaving the stove light on, locking the doors, and listening to the winter wind as I fall asleep in flannels.

Sleep is life’s great escape–a reward for getting through the day, especially days like last weekend when chaos seemed to reign. We close our eyes and we are literally unconscious, for what we hope is eight hours of warm bliss.

But I’m not letting us off that easy. We humans have a tendency to just accept biological habits without really looking at them in a curious way, and it turns out that sleep is a rather fascinating function. And I promise to beguile you here before you head off to the sports page. There’s an important truth about life tucked in at the end.

Sleep, it turns out, is not merely rest; it is a state the body must enter to survive. The brain shuts down consciousness on purpose. It cleans itself and resets. Awareness, it turns out, is not the highest good from a biological standpoint.

But why would life allow this? Humans had to be vigilant throughout the eons to survive: we’ve had to watch for predators, gather food, and protect our loved ones. It seems counter-evolutionary to allow human beings to close their eyes to the world and fall into an unconscious state for a third of a day. And yet, that’s exactly what we do.

Perhaps the most important function of our sleep is to clean the clocks, sort out the system, and reset the code. And for reasons we don’t understand, this programming cannot be done with any sort of human awareness interfering. You cannot be conscious while being repaired. You must be anesthetized.

And here’s the thing: sleep actually claims us. We don’t get to choose the moment we fall asleep. We are taken, like grateful, weary hostages, into the moment of sleep, and cast down a tunnel where cycles begin: REM sleep, non-REM sleep, paralysis, hallucination, and amnesia. Your brain begins to scrub itself, as if taking a bath, opening and flooding channels, cleaning up the chemical debris your thoughts leave–the debris that fear and decision-making leave. When you go to bed at night, you invite a trusted nighttime janitor into your brain.

And then dreams begin. Dreams are how the body processes unresolved thoughts and feelings–like a built-in therapist that doesn’t send you a bill. They show us things we’d rather avoid in the daylight: what we fear losing, what we’re suppressing, what we’re not quite ready to admit to ourselves.

Modern science isn’t comfortable with inner experience. In my opinion, it leads us away from it. Science pushes the idea that life is about rational control, and that meaning only exists if we consciously create it. Our culture wants us to focus almost entirely on the outer world while dismissing the inner one. But dreams quietly insist otherwise. They remind us that something inside us is always working, always telling the truth–whether science approves or not.

Here’s a fact about sleep that dazzles me most: consciousness is not the default system. It’s not the big cheese in life. If it were, why would we abandon it for a third of our lives? No, awareness–the thing we are supposed to prize most–becomes toxic if it runs too long. Why? Because consciousness is not the system. The system just uses it–and abandons it when necessary. The real system is a kind of order or operating system some of us call God; others call it some sort of universal intelligence.

So when we hear the phrase “sleep in heavenly peace,” it isn’t sentimental or naive. It names something we rarely admit: that consciousness is not the highest state. It means that you do not manage everything on your own. Meaning, understanding, and repair continue even when you are not watching. Reality seems to be held by something deeper than your own efforts or control.

In a world that tells us to stay alert and informed, sleeping in heavenly peace offers us an alternative. Peace does not come from holding everything together. It comes from knowing that you never were holding it all together in the first place. At least not by yourself.