Luke 16:22
Luke 16:2222One day the beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. And the rich man also died and was buried.
JWs read as a parable using popular Jewish folklore to make a point about materialism, not a description of the afterlife. ("the dead know nothing") is the controlling text. The rich man's consciousness, Abraham's speech, and the great chasm are all treated as symbolic imagery for a lesson about riches and faithfulness — the dead are unconscious until the resurrection, and Jesus is not actually describing how death works.
Even granted that Luke 16 is a parable, Jesus' parables use real-world categories — sowers, seeds, sheep, vineyards, fathers, sons — not cosmologies he rejects. If Jesus taught soul-sleep, building a lesson on the rich man's consciousness, memory, and thirst after death is the worst parable he could have constructed. The parable's categories ASSUME conscious existence after death. Pair with (souls under the altar crying out) and (Jesus commits his spirit to the Father at death) to establish the consistent NT pattern: every NT author who describes death describes the dead as conscious. At the door: "Even if Luke 16 is a parable, parables run on real categories. If soul-sleep were true, Jesus built his parable on a cosmology he knew was false. Which is more likely — that Jesus mis-set his own parable, or that the rich man's consciousness is the point?"