Perhaps there is a bit of confusion concerning your question; what I mean is that technically, what we call our "higher consciousness" I define as our awake and active mind, perhaps projected even higher to the Spiritual Plane while we are awake and aware. I think you are perhaps referring to our soul, which never really sleeps.

The ego is a Freudian term describing the determined and forceful part of our conscious minds. So, in answering this question, I have taken the liberty of defining those terms in order to provide you with my opinion.

Scientists still do not understand why we must sleep. They know what happens when we do not sleep- we get distracted, have trouble concentrating, and if it goes on long enough, we can become delusional and even die. This is why sleep-deprivation is used as a torture technique. I think when we sleep, our subconscious rules the roost. What is in there, I am not sure, but certainly our fears and hopes and desires are there. Where does our ego go? To sleep. This allows the other parts of our soul and brain to function, and provides the brain with renewed energy and all sorts of neat stuff when we awake...like answers to that algebra problem we could not figure out last night! Sleep is amazing, and important.

I hope this provides you with a little bit of an answer to your question.

Blessings, Jai

Sweet Dreams!

I believe that the ego is like the security guard who thinks he owns the building.

The ego is not doing anything it is asleep as jaianniah said. When I was a girl I would hear people say there are 3 parts to our conscious mind the Me, the myself, and the I. Well myself and me has to take a back seat to I. The ego is the I it is always throwing the fear and doubt in there of you can't do this or you know you are not qualified for this job why try.

So, sleep let us gets some rest from the ego I because there is a subsciousness that takes over and does what it does what it suppose to do and if we can tap into it we can guide it to do other stuff as well. It refleshes our body through sleep, heals where it can, organize and categorize and departmentalize things for us if we ever learn how to get in touch with our subsciousness it will be organize and waiting on us.

The ego has four primary states: waking, dreaming, sleep, and transpersonal. It also has four degrees of freedom, or four primary phases of consciousness example: consciousness in waking state- focused through the ego complex, consciousness in the dream (REM) rapid eye movement focused the through dream-ego (a complex), consciousness in the sleep (NREM) no rapid eye movement, state is of one formless rest, and peace, and consciousness in the transpersonal state equates to a wide variety of altered states of consciousness.

Jung (1981) said “though sleep is a state in which consciousness is greatly restricted, the psyche by no means ceases to exist, and act.” (p. 143) Thus, we have psychic activity in all four quadrants. Every human being has a waking consciousness which is normally associated with the ego, a dream consciousness, a sleep consciousness, and a transpersonal consciousness.

There are of course other perspectives on this matter example: the ego does not exist, sleeping ego can only be revealed from the perspective of waking ego, sleep has meaning only related to waking, and the ego is only an absence of awareness, and darkness.

Personally, I think the ego is with us all the time in our sleeping state, and in our waking state. When we are in our sleeping state, the ego is like a guard doing his patrol and is waiting on us for any signs of activity to take action, and to resume his role in our waking state as the ego.