Kevin McGehee is concerned about someone in cryonic suspension somehow retaining consciousness and going mad, like someone in a perpetual sensory deprivation chamber.

I'm not, for at least two reasons.

First, the suspendee is given a heavy dose of barbiturates to prevent any pain that occurs during the temporary resuscitation necessary to circulate the anti-freeze. Since the body doesn't metabolize in suspension, this drugged state would persist until the body is repaired and revived.

Second, I find the notion that a body frozen at that temperature, with no ability for synapses to fire, could possibly have any consciousness at all to be much more unlikely than even the prospects for future reanimation.

There may be some good reasons not to be suspended, but this isn't one that I would even consider.

There was a science fiction short story about an expedition to Pluto - the last survivor of the trip steps outside and quickly strips naked in order to become a corpsicle and be rescued in the future. Unfortunately - as the planet slowly spins the sun rises and falls around him - and every time the sun rises he becomes conscious - but his thinking is very very slow and he sees the sun whip above him and set - over and over and over ....

Forget the author. Arthur C. Clarke perhaps? Pohl?

I vaguely recall a story like that by Clarke.

Nope, Larry Niven's "Wait It Out".

We have a better understanding of superconductivity now, but the story is nearly forty years old.

And as I recall the story, it was when the sun came up that he blacked out -- and he was watching the stars whip overhead. Allegedly the warmth of the sun (such as it was) broke down the superconducting mechanism Niven was postulating for the human brain.

Since it's been brought up, that may have influenced my thinking on the dreaming corpsicles in the first place...

Thanks all! You're right - it was Niven and I had remembered it backwards.

Philip K. Dick had a story published in Playboy wherein the main character is a passenger on a sub-light speed interstellar voyage. He is supposed to be 'asleep' like everybody else on board but due to an equipment failure he's awake. The ship's supervising computer attempts to keep him sane by replaying bits of his life back at him but his own obsessions get him caught in a loop of reliving the most unpleasant moments.

I can't help wondering if this served as an inspiration for part of 'Red Dwarf.' Holly the computer tells Dave Lister that his reason for choosing the crew member Lister hates more than any other candidate as his holographic companion is that the irritation might help keep him motivated.