How do soul sleep adherents explain 1 Peter 3:18-20? 1 Peter 3:18-20: Because even Messiah once suffered for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to Elohim, having been put to death indeed in flesh but made alive in the Spirit, 19 in which also He went and proclaimed unto the spirits in prison, 20 who were disobedient at one time when the patience of Elohim waited in the days of Noaḥ, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight beings, were saved through water,


This seems to disprove consciousness ceases at death.
Most likely the reason this question is not getting much traction is because no one who believes in the unconscious state of the dead prior to Jesus' second coming actually use the term &quot;soul sleep&quot;. We believe the spirit returns to God upon death (Ecclesiastes 12:7), and the person is only figuratively sleeping in the grave without consciousness. Moving on...

Often this passage gets quoted to prove that souls are conscious after death, however this interpretation  is a contradiction of another popular parable often quoted for the same purpose, the Rich man and Lazarus. If the common interpretation that Jesus went and preached to the antediluvian souls in hell after death is true, then the whole point of the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus becomes mute.

&quot;If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.&quot; Luke 16:31

Therefore, obviously this cannot be the interpretation. Did they not have Noah preaching to them for who knows how many years? Was not even the Garden of Eden still on earth back then as a testimony against them?
Rather this verse has a spiritual meaning in reference to spirits in prisons. Consider what Jesus states here:

&quot;The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;&quot; (Isaiah 61:1)

Now to quote some preachers. Uriah Smith, a founding father of the Seventh Day Adventist church has an article on this very verse, writes &quot;The whole idea is forced, unnatural, and absurd. The preaching that was given to them was through Noah, who, by the power of the Holy Ghost (1 Peter 1:12), delivered to them the message of warning. And on the meaning of spirits in prison, &quot;But in what sense were they in prison? - In the same sense in which persons in error and darkness are said to be in prison. Isaiah 42:7: “To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.”&quot;
Doug Bachelor, a popular Adventist preacher today, addresses it in a video here.
Finally, consider the straight forward reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 and 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. It is simple, and makes no conflated points of conscious souls descending from heaven to retrieve their physical bodies.

&quot;For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.&quot;(1 These 4:16-17)
&quot;Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.&quot; (1 Cor 15:51-52)