The Spirituality of Bugs

A SHORT STORY ABOUT When a hungover spaceman wakes up in an off-world jail with a feline alien he finds out his carnivorous cell mate is about to do him in.
It deals with what appears at first glance to be an incongruency: the far-flung future, but one with a prevalent trailer-trash mentality. Despite achieving interstellar commerce, many humans are still low level, unplanning philistines, devoid of any spiritual or intellectual attributes.
In this story some alien species consider Earth people unusual in that many humans behave in an animal-like fashion. Most aliens are are built on a different plan, with accountability for actions NOT on the sleep/wake cycle of Earth's day/night. Among many nonhuman species there are alternating periods of Consciousness, but this does not follow the human concept of sleep/wake and day/night. The aliens are always awake (i.e., not in the coma-like state of sleep) but rather they "Revert" to an animal-like state from time to time, to rest, eat, reproduce. During that time of reversion, they are decidedly irresponsible for their actions.
The aliens certainly understand that we human are unaccountable for our actions while in our coma-like state of 'sleep' but they assume that except for the presence of daily temporary coma that we would be accountable for our actions at all other times while 'awake'.
They do not understand why humans seem to be unconscious at odd intervals while awake. They do not understand why we humans habitually accept that many of us are not held accountable for our animal-like actions while awake.
In human culture inexorable social forces excuse bad behavior by removing accountability in small pieces: bad upbringing, alcoholism, addiction, etc. The one excuse all of us, whether liberal or conservative, take for granted is that of 'being asleep', one that the aliens find as an unusual feature of our makeup, but certainly understandable. What they do not understand is our unconscious behavior while awake.
This story shows how an alien forces a drunken sailor to equate 'awake' with 'enlightenment' and 'asleep' with 'unconscious animal-like existence'. And sleep has always been a metaphor for 'unenlightenment'. The alien is amazed that not only do ALL humans go into a nocturnal coma-like unconscious state but that MOST also, more or less, sleep-walk their way through their waking hours and are not really awake in any spiritual sense.
Except for the punishment of actually falling asleep on guard duty, we humans maintain no level of responsibility for ourselves while asleep and that is easy to reconcile due to the coma-like paralysis we are accustomed to. But the aliens are amazed that we have also removed responsibility from most of our actions while awake due to legal and social exemptions, i.e., 'addicted', 'insane', 'enraged'. But 'UNconscious' (in the sleeping sense) with us means 'INactive'. What if it didn't? Alternating periods of consciousness and unconsciousness might not follow the wake/sleep paralleling the day/night pattern we have evolved on Earth.
In this story, the aliens alternate periods of Consciousness (during which they are 'intelligent') with periods of Unconsciousness (during which they are active, but are like animals). While Unconscious, they mate, hunt, eat, as well as refresh and rest their brains. To them, the idea of going into the coma-like state we call 'sleep' is a foreign idea and it intrigues them we have a heavy urge to drink alcohol, as though we were attempting to mimic their own pattern.