Customer Reviews

Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Healing Night offers practical ways to combat sleep disorders. Dr. Naiman eschews approved FDA pharmaceutical sleep aids in favor of a natural approach. Some of the suggestions include using meditation and exercise to reduce stress levels. A must read self help book for anyone who has anxiety and insomnia. I rate it 5 Z's.

I am going to really go out on a limb here and say this is one of the most important, best "help" books I have ever read. I met Dr. Naiman recently at a fitness resort and attended almost every class. I went home and read the book after this remarkable experience. This book is not just a sleep book it's a how to LIVE book so that you CAN sleep. Clearly, understanding the science of sleep is helpful but Dr. Neiman also includes the history of sleep and how some sleep patterns we might think of as bad, really are not....night wakings, for example.

Dr. Naiman's use of dream therapy is like opening a new door. I used to dismiss dreams and dreaming. I now see how important it is and how paying attention to dreams helps one in everyday life. I learned dreams are not always what they seem.

"Healing Night" is also very beautifully and intellectually written, making it not only helpful but also enjoyable. I'd give this book ten stars if Amazon would let me. It will be forever by my bed while I sleep peacefully (now).

This book was informative, although much of the information I already knew. It did not add much to what has been written before. I think I was expecting more.
Since many of the premises were repeated continually, it seemed like this book was an effort to take an interesting article or thesis and make it into a book. It could have been much shorter.

This book presents an interesting perspective on sleep and how our modern culture is destroying this often misunderstood human need. It is a very intellectual read but the author gives recommendations on ways to "heal the night" at the end of each chapter that are fairly straight forward.

This book was written from the heart and provides a warm, nurturing guide for respecting the rhythms of our nature.

This book should be standard reading material for everyone who has wondered why their sleep/waking life is not in sync with the world. We have so gotten away from what nature delivers to us on a daily/nightly basis:the dark. Rubin Naiman artfully explains what we can do to recapture what can heal us: honor the Night. And in doing so, we also honor ourselves, our dreams and bring about our awakening to a new and more nature-driven world.

I like this. It has a ton of really useful idea that don't involved heavy handed use of pharmaceuticals.