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Sleep is considered a vital and active phenomenon, a necessary sequel to being awake during which the tissue protoplasm repairs itself. This rhythmic cycle
of sleeping and waking is considered to be a property of all organic living matter which remotely descends from a similar principle of rotation in nature as seen in the alternation of days and nights. Sleep in the newborn is polyphasic, that is to say, during one day numerous phases of sleeping and awakening are seen, but later grows to be monophasic with waking during the day and sleeping at night. The author, following Jekels and Bergler,1 also considers sleeping as a death disturbed by dreams since death itself is equated with sleeping without dreams. She carries this theory further as follows: the repeated wakenings in the polyphasic type are to overcome the dread of death. Dreaming represents an introjection of the external world in the transition from the polyphasic to the monophasic types. Thus while in the polyphasic sleep of the infant the dread of death is overcome by wakening, in the monophasic sleep of the adult it is overcome by dreaming in which there is contact with the introjected external world.
It seems to me that the author's formulations result in a paradox for if sleep is biologically an active and vital repair process, how does it come to be a state feared as an equivalent to death? The paradox is resolved in this rather speculative paper by postulating that sleep is always felt as a process of dying but of a dying which implicitly carries the possibility of rebirth. In is to this implicit expectation of waking after sleeping that the author attributes the automatism of repetition, otherwise called repetition compulsion.