Deep Sleep as Consequence, Not Cause
Gnostic texts present Adam in a state of spiritual sleep before the Fall proper. The Apocryphon of John depicts Adam requiring awakening: "I entered into the midst of the dungeon which is the prison of the body. And I spoke thus: 'He who hears, let him arise from the deep sleep.'" Adam's pre-Fall state here is one of ignorance and imprisonment rather than glory.The deep sleep itself represented spiritual death: "Even then he forthwith sank down into a swoon, into sleep, viz. into an unability, which signifies the death: for the image of God, which is immutable, does not sleep. Whatsoever is eternal has no time in it; but by the sleep the time was manifest in man, for he slept in the angelical world, and awaked to the outward world."
Böhme explicitly states that Adam's celestial perfection precluded sleep: "A reasonable person will easily perceive that there could be no sleep in Adam as long as he was in the image of God... We shall then not need the elements, neither the sun nor the moon, and also require no sleep" (Three Principles, xii.17).
The tardema that falls upon Adam isn't arbitrary divine action. It's the culmination of what he's been doing.
You can't maintain waking consciousness when your organizing orientation has collapsed.
The deep sleep is what happens when the tether to Life releases. Adam's refusal to take freely of the Tree—his standing apart, his installation of measurement distance—has disconnected him from what sustained unified awareness.
He sleeps because he's already unconscious in the ways that matter.
The sleep doesn't cause his separation from Eve; it manifests the separation already underway in his cooled tincture, his contracted field-participation.
