We don’t get sleep because we don’t get sleep.
Our definitions of sleep are typically negative. That is, they tell us what sleep is not. In the same way we naively think of health as the absence of disease, we think of sleep as the absence of waking or the absence of consciousness. What is sleep? It’s not waking, not awareness, not consciousness. Scientifically, sleep is defined as non-REM — it’s not dreaming. Negative definitions are common, seductive and misleading. Knowing what sleep is not simply does not tell us what it is. Getting that we don’t get sleep, we don’t know what it is, getting that it is a mystery is an essential first step in healing our sleep. step