Why Sleep Is Sacred: Faith, Fear and Rest in the Night
By Ken Wytsma
I was just four years old the first time I remember being truly terrified at night. My dad was on navy deployment at the time, and we lived in a two-story townhouse in the Netherlands in the province of South Holland. I can picture the layout quite clearly. The bedrooms were upstairs, connected by a creaky, twisty staircase with metal rails. It’s one of those memories that comes very close to being the first thing I can vividly recall.
To this day, my sister insists that we had just come back from a Halloween party with our mom, but I don’t remember that part. What I do remember is waking up in the middle of the night, utterly overcome with fear. Like any child might, I made a beeline for my parents’ bedroom, but on reaching the hallway at the top of the stairs, I froze. I recall being acutely aware that something dark lurked below, waiting to swallow me whole.
That moment—the nightmare and the terror that sent me running out of my bedroom in the first place—was my first taste of how fear and faith often meet in the dark. Over time, I began to realize that the stories we carry into the night, the ones we believe about God, safety, and ourselves, shape how we lie down and what kind of rest we find there. For some, a sense of spiritual grounding brings calm and steadiness. For others, uncertainty or unprocessed questions can keep the mind alert, stretching the long night. Research backs this up. Spiritual trust can calm the body into deeper rest, while spiritual tension can keep sleep at a distance. What we believe doesn’t stay on the surface; it follows us to bed and can be magnified in the darkness and solitude of the night.
My Holland memory—irrational, unexplainable, yet completely real to my four-yearold mind—was my first experience of sleep as an encounter rather than an escape. I couldn’t have named it then, but I felt it in my body: Sleep isn’t merely biological; it’s deeply human. As such, it has human tendencies and flaws. Sometimes it delivers us into a space of peace, and sometimes it delivers us to a place where fear, memory, longing, and the unknown all swirl together and grip us in the shadows.
As unpredictable as it is, sleep connects us all and points to something deeper. In that way, it’s sacred. Across history, religions have treated sleep with reverence, though in very different ways. Some offer comfort: a divine presence watching over us. Others warn of spirits or trials in the night. But across traditions, one thing is clear: Sleep matters. From the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews to the Greeks, night was seen as a threshold where dreams spoke and hidden truths surfaced.
When I think back to that little boy frozen at the top of the stairs, I don’t see just fear. I see something much deeper. I see an example of how humans have wrestled down through time with the night and the many mysteries it contains. When we sleep, our body lets go, and our soul starts to ask questions. If we can find answers to such questions, we may finally be able to reclaim the concept of sleep as a sacred right. Let’s explore how some cultures and traditions have viewed sleep and the concept of night over the centuries—as both a deeply mysterious time and a sacred right.
Letting Go of the Day
Throughout human history, sleep has been seen as a sort of “threshold between worlds,” a space where the soul meets something greater, often something divine. A liminal space. This universal reverence for the sacredness of sleep finds its way into creation myths from religions around the world.
