Alright, let’s get this over with.

I’m not too crazy about book recommendations and I assume you aren’t either.

My Amazon wish list alone has over 100 books and it’s a bit frustrating to go to some website to find a huge list of 50 “books that everyone must read.” I’ve already got enough recommendations on my list.

So if I recommend a sleep-related book on this page, I can assure you it is good.

My main criterion is that the book must be life-changing in some way. It must change the way you look at things, and open you up to a new perspective that will influence your existence.

Healing Night by Rubin Naiman

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

In reading this book, I couldn’t quite tell if I should recommend this to people who have trouble sleeping, or people who believe they sleep well.

On the one hand, every insomniac must read this book. It puts the “disorder” in a much wider context, mentioning that insomnia didn’t really exist before the invention of the light bulb, also emphasizing that a few midnight awakenings can actually be a sign of good sleep.

On the other hand, I feel that every normal sleeper should read this book. It shows just how our modern lifestyle — particularly our avoidance of sunlight mixed with our overexposure to artificial light — has “flattened” our sleep-wake cycle. It’s flattened our conscious experience. Our suppression of melatonin has limited our intimacy with dreaming. Our reliance on “counterfeit energizers” — sugar and caffeine — has robbed us of what it’s really like to feel alive during the day.

At 200 pages this book is beautifully succinct. I soaked it up in just one sitting.

Rubin Naiman’s approach to sleep is wholly refreshing. He views sleep as not purely a mechanistic science, nor as something overly spiritual. He approaches sleep from the broad historical, scientific and philosophical context. You’ll not only improve your understanding of sleep, but also dreams and what they mean.

But to me the importance of the book was learning how to lift ourselves out of artificial daze. By sacrificing sleep, our waking consciousness loses tenacity. A quote from Fight Club says that when you have insomnia, you’re never fully asleep or fully awake. Healing Night teaches you the contrary — how to be both fully asleep and fully awake. It’s the yin and yang of true conscious experience.

If you read this book, you won’t be the same person 10 years from now. Its message is that good.

The first few pages can be read at Dr. Naiman’s website: (pdf link).

And here’s the Amazon page for Healing Night.

Quote from page 21:

Our very consciousness is in need of repair. Like the attention deficit world we live in, it is scattered — segregated, even fragmented. Sleep and dreams are sharply set apart from waking, although fragments of these states now cut and bleed into one another. We see an epidemic of wakefulness intruding into our sleep and dreams as insomnia. The resulting sleep and dream debt seeps back into our wakefulness as the dangerous mental smog of daze. We mistake the jittery buzz of counterfeit energies for natural vitality. Half-awake in our sleep and half-asleep in our waking, we are never completely at rest and seldom fully conscious.

Other Books?

I’ll update this page when there are more books worth recommendation. Don’t expect the list to get longer than 2 or 3 books, though.