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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Soul of Sleep, September 17, 2007
This review is from: Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (Paperback)
I heard an interview with the author of this book on the radio and immediately ordered it from Amazon. What caught my attention was his way of placing the problem of insomnia into a much wider context, even changing the way I thought about sleep in the short time of the interview. What intrigued me was that he compared the sleep/wake, day/night cycle to the classic Chinese Yin/Yang symbol, which has, in addition to the black/white shapes, a dot of white in the black shape, and a dot of black in the white shape. In pre-industrial times, when people slept and woke up in a more natural rhythm, there was a little piece of the night in the day - the afternoon nap or siesta. But most interesting, something I had never heard of before, was the little piece of day in the night - what was called the Watches, or the Night Watch. People would wake up in the middle of the night quite naturally for a few hours, and this was a time for meditation, prayer, and love-making. This natural rhythm of sleeping and waking at night was actually confirmed in a sleep study which demonstrated that when left to themselves, people have a first sleep of three to four hours, then a period of wakefulness, followed by a refreshing second sleep also three to four hours.
The book changed the way I ask questions about sleep - not, why can't I get to sleep, but also, do I really wake up fully, or am I in what the author calls a "daze," a state of artificial waking? How do I view sleep, is it part of the sacred and mysterious night or is it only taking the body off-line for required maintenance in order to assure its daytime productivity? He shows how the drive to be productive produces a mechanistic view of the body and robs the soul.
There is so much more in this book, and I recommend it highly to anyone who has trouble sleeping, but also to anyone who sleeps well. Because it is not so much about sleep as a biological necessity as it is about sleep as an inseparable aspect of the mystery of night and day.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Healing Night, Healthy Spirits, April 22, 2006
This review is from: Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (Paperback)
Reading "Healing Night" was a blessed experience. Dr. Naiman's artful and sentimental writing style beguiles readers while they absorb vast amounts of technical science and advanced spirituality vital to their well-being.
Dr. Naiman is conversational, but scholarly. Poetic...yet prosaic. His strong, human, caring, and qualified voice effectively ushers readers into the life-threatening plight of our sleepless and dreamless world.
Throughout "Healing Night", Dr. Naiman gently weaves his ever important message of developing and maintaining healthy sleeping, dreaming, and waking patterns with personalized anecdotal threads. The results are a seemingly effortless and beautiful tapestry of the psychology, physiology, and spirituality necessary for readers to understand and overcome our cultural and sociological addiction to artificial light, sleeping pills and waking "aids".
"Healing Night" is a rare, masterful recipe for nursing our parched, exhausted, ignored, and overstimulated souls back to health. If you are serious about improving your relationship with sleep...or with yourself, "Healing Night" is the most comprehensive medical and spiritual manual that I have ever come across.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strongly recommended for readers suffering from sleep disorders, May 2, 2006
This review is from: Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (Paperback)
Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening, authored by sleep and dream medicine specialist Rubin R. Naiman (Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona's Program in Integrative Medicine), provides the reader with theoretical, historical, and psychological understandings of dreams, including a multitude of strategies and innovative ideas for assisting, conditioning, treating or growing beyond sleep disorders. Introducing readers to diverse conceptual explorations of dreaming and dream sciences drawn from a variety of perceptive interpretations and over twenty-five years of medical dream-oriented experience, Professor Naiman enables the reader to arrive at a concise and highly acute understanding of dreams in spiritual, scientific, and medical ideologies. Healing Night is very strongly recommended for readers suffering from sleep disorders, as well as students of the dream-sciences and psychology, and those searching for tools to evaluate dream interpretation utilizing perspectives from philosophical, literary, mythological, and modern psychological sciences.
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