Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

But it was a twilight sleep, semiconscious and mindful for a few minutes at a time, until his thoughts would lose coherence and stray into blurry wisps that were to real dreams as cobwebs are to spiderwebs.

Though, according to the theory that Dodge was developing, the loss of consciousness when you fell asleep was basically the same as dying except that you could wake up from it.

Seems legit

Far from being a source of frustration, this comforted him, and made him happy—perhaps even a little smug—that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

Kant, who had posited that the mind simply was not capable of thinking about anything at all without mapping it onto space and time. The brain was just hooked up that way, nothing you could do about it.