Sleep is as essential to homeostasis as any of the physiologically recognized systems, e.g renal, endocrine etc.
We ignorantly call it rest but the brain is probably at its most connected to self with outside stimuli shut out. It's at its most fulfilled.
The brain activity with slower gamma bursts is nourishment to the soul if I may indulge in this spiritual drift for a moment, risking being shot live. We're born in a world where the perception is all we know
about self, once civilized.
We need the ego to disappears to connect. We can't possibly stay lost forever.
Dissociative anesthesia with kétamine-like drugs is not something most of us tend to use, being such control freaks. This though is the closest one can possibly get away from one's body while still there, literally speaking.
No one wants to operate on anyone moving around or talking. It probably is the window to the fact that sleep, general anesthesia, far eastern touch points even death are just staggered states of awareness in a parallel sphere.
Parallel spheres we need to connect or step into to regas. Parallel spheres where One is suprême. No duality or contrast. Sleep, glorious sleep without vultures in the background, so to say. That parallel sphere where pain is foreign. Where one is holding Judas clos. Friends close. Did someone mention meditation?
A newborn can be operated on without much analgesia until he
learns what pain is, in our perception drenched world context. The spinothalamic tract is there, but the cortical interpretation
is diffusé still. It's using the parallel sphere its just escaped still. I am in no way minimizing the adaptation that pain gives us to survive the rat race.
The bigger picture might help reduce our pathological fear of death if we paused to learn. All variables considered, we need death just as much, probably more than life itself. Now you hopefully get the picture Lazarus had as he was yanked out of paradise. Ice age II ré run.
If biochemistry and physiology of beauty and health are the elements of every mix, then results are assured