Need a single term for a set of sleeping people [closed]

Sleeping is not out of the question:

Do not wake the sleeping.

Sleeping is an example of—in traditional grammar terms—a nominalized adjective or an adjectival noun. It's an adjective—in this case a present participle adjective—functioning as a noun:

. . . an adjective that has undergone nominalization, and is thus used as a noun. In the rich and the poor, the adjectives rich and poor function as nouns denoting people who are rich and poor respectively. . . . The most common appearance of the nominalized adjective in English is when an adjective is used to indicate a collective group. This happens in the case where a phrase such as the poor people becomes the poor. The adjective poor is nominalized, and the noun people disappears.

_{Source: Wikipedia Nominalized adjective. See also: Annotated Bibliography : B1 Adjectival Nouns}

CGEL—in its chapter titled Nouns and noun phrases—classes this form as one of several types of a "fusion of internal modifier and head":

(f) Modifier-heads with special interpretations

[29] i   [The French] do these differently from [the Dutch].
     ii  [The rich] cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven.
     iii How will the new system affect [the very poor]?
     iv  We are going to attempt [the utterly impossible].
     v   This is verging on [the immoral].
     vi  They like to swim in [the nude].

A rather restricted range of adjectives . . . occur in fused-head constructions with special interpretations. The NPs are determined by the definite article – we couldn’t even substitute a demonstrative: *these very poor. Examples [i–iii] illustrate a subtype denoting categories of human being; these NPs are characteristically used generically, as here. . . . NPs like those in [ii–iii] can be paraphrased by means of those + relative clause: those who are rich /very poor. This subtype includes adjectives based on past participle forms or similar denominal derivatives in ·ed: the disadvantaged, the intellectually gifted, the unemployed, the hard-hearted, and so on.

_{Source: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Ch. 5 §9.3 (f)}

Note that CGEL does not mention adjectives based on present participle forms here, and it's true that it is unusual to use a present participle adjective in this manner. But COCA turns up a good number of examples, including the dying and the missing. And you will not be entirely alone if you use the sleeping; COCA returns four or five relevant examples:

_{Source: Corpus of Contemporary American English (click THE SLEEPING . to expand)}

If using sleeping as a noun for a collective group still bothers you, you can try a relative clause:

Do not wake those who are sleeping.

Then you can reduce the relative clause:

Do not wake those sleeping.

That gains you little if nothing, though.

Lastly, why can't we nominalize the adjective asleep as we did sleeping? Asleep is a predicative-only adjective; it can't be use attributively (in front of a noun). We can say the people are asleep, but we can't say the asleep people. We can turn sleeping people into the sleeping by dropping the noun following the attributive sleeping. But there is no attributive asleep, so there is no noun following it to drop.