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.
