Cayce
Q - "What is the best way for me to get to sleep?"
A - "Labor sufficiently of a physical nature to tire the body; not mentally, but physically." Cayce (2067-3)
Q - "What are the best hours for sleep?"
A - "When the body is physically tired, whether at noon or twelve o'clock at night." Cayce (440-2)
Brunton
"What is ordinarily known during deep sleep is the veil of ignorance which covers the Real. That is, the knowing faculty, the awareness is still present, but caught in the ignorance, the veiling, and knowing nothing else. The sage, however, carries into sleep the awareness he had in wakefulness. He may let it dim down to a glimmer, but it is always there." Brunton (25-2.180)
Dale Carnegie
"If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep." Dale Carnegie
4 Quotes By Nikola Tesla Regarding Sleep
1. “A man receives a certain term of life; so many hours to pass on this earth–I mean hours when he ls alive, awake; I do not count the hours when he is sleeping; I do not believe they are, strictly speaking, included in his term of life. When a man really lives he is dying hour by hour, but when he sleeps he is accumulating vital forces which will make him go on living. In other words, in measuring out our dole of hours to each one of us, the great timekeeper stops his count while we are sleeping. Therefore, the longer a man sleeps the longer he will remain on earth. Nearly all long-lived people have been great sleepers. When De Lesseps was on the ocean he would sleep twenty hours on a stretch. Gladstone is a great sleeper, and averages twelve hours a day. I can believe that a man who would learn to sleep eighteen hours a day might live 200 years.“ –NT
(“Tesla On Long Life And Sleep.” By Elmer Willyoung. Electrical Engineer, New York, February 24, 1897.)
2. “I do not sleep well. My mind will not let me. It is going night and day. There is no more tyrannical thing than a mind that is accustomed to thought. It really seems to resent me falling asleep. It pounds for attention until I wake up again.“–NT
(“Tesla Predicts New Source of Power In Year.” New York Herald Tribune. July 9, 1933.)
3. “My sleeplessness does not worry me. Sometimes I doze for an hour or so. Occasionally, however, once in a few months, I may sleep for four or five hours. Then I awaken virtually charged with energy, like a battery. Nothing can stop me after such a night. I feel great strength then. There is no doubt about it but that sleep is a restorer, a vitalizer, that it increases energy. But on the other hand, I do not think it is essential to one’s well-being, particularly if one is habitually a poor sleeper.”–NT
(“Tremendous New Power Soon To Be Released.” Charleston Daily Mail, Charleston, West Virginia, Page 40. September 10, 1933.)
4. “I sleep about one and one-half hours a night. I think that is enough for any man. When I was young I needed more sleep. But age doesn’t require so much. There are so many things to do I do not want to spend time sleeping needlessly. In my family all were poor sleepers. Time spent in sleep is lost time, we always felt.”?NT
(“Dr. Visions the End of Aircraft in War.” Every Week Magazine, Oct. 21, 1934.)
On February 13, 1972, a 33-year-old French geologist named Michel Siffre climbed into a hole in the Texas desert — and disappeared from time itself.
The cave was called Midnight Cave. He descended 440 feet from the entrance into a vast underground chamber. His team had loaded it with frozen food, water, a tent, a bicycle, a pellet gun, and scientific equipment.
What they did not pack: a single clock.
His mission was strange, almost impossible to explain to outsiders. He wanted to know what the human mind does when you strip away every anchor to time — no sunrise, no sunset, no schedule. Just darkness, silence, and whatever rhythm the body chose to follow on its own.
He would sleep when he felt tired. Eat when he felt hungry. Call his research team each time he woke up or went to bed. They would record everything.
But they would tell him nothing.
At first, things felt almost normal. He exercised. He read. He took blood pressure readings and ran mental tests. He settled into what felt like a regular daily rhythm.
Then something began to shift beneath his awareness.
What felt to him like a full night's sleep might last eighteen hours. What felt like a long, productive day might stretch to thirty-six hours of continuous wakefulness. His internal clock — the ancient biological mechanism that keeps humans tethered to the Earth's rotation — had quietly come untethered.
When he tried to count out two minutes as a check, it took him five minutes to reach what he counted as 120 seconds. Time wasn't just slipping. It was warping.
Weeks passed. Then months. The darkness pressed in.
Early on, mice had been a nuisance — scratching and scurrying in the night. He trapped them, annoyed. But five months in, starving for any living presence, he heard a new mouse in his tent and nearly wept with joy. He tried to befriend it. Left it jam. Spoke to it.
Then, trying to catch it gently, he killed it by accident.
The grief that followed was total.
"I am living through the nadir of my life," he wrote in his diary. "I am wasting my life in this stupid research."
His record player had broken. Mildew had consumed his books. His memory was deteriorating — he could barely recall what he had done two days before. Every day blurred into the same endless, lightless tunnel.
He thought about quitting.
He didn't.
On September 5, 1972, his team called him on the telephone. The experiment was over.
Siffre's response: "You're joking."
He thought it was mid-August. In his mind, he still had weeks to go. Nearly three weeks of his life had simply vanished — not forgotten, but never recorded by his brain in the first place.
He climbed out of the earth $100,000 in debt, physically depleted, and psychologically shaken in ways that took years to fully understand.
But what he carried out of that cave changed science.
His experiment became the founding proof that humans possess an internal biological clock — a circadian rhythm — that operates entirely independently of the sun. That clock can stretch, compress, and wander when cut off from the world's cues. It doesn't keep perfect time. It needs the light.
NASA studied his findings to help prepare astronauts for the psychological toll of isolation in space. Sleep researchers used his work to decode jet lag and shift work disorders. Psychologists applied it to understand what solitary confinement does to the human mind.
Michel Siffre went underground to study time.
What he found was something far older: the body has its own clock. And without the sun to wind it, it runs wild.
We think we experience reality directly. We don't. We construct it — second by second — from cues so constant and ordinary that we never notice them until they're gone.
The light. The clock. The rhythm of a day.
Take them away, and the mind begins to drift into places it was never meant to go.
Some truths can only be reached by going somewhere no one else is willing to stay.
See Also
Brain Waves
Dream
Ego
Mind
Subconscious
Superconscious
Unconscious