****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is a remarkable and interesting book about human consciousness. Really - it is much more interesting than it sounds like it would be. This is not a New Age-y manifesto but a amusing trip through sleep and waking life.It is written by a journalist, not a scientist or doctor, and it has a fun, quirky style with a lot of humorous comic book style diagrams.The first, most interesting, half is about sleep. Different stages of sleep and types of dreams. The best parts are the sections about lucid dreaming and the watch. I am a person who strives to achieve lucid dreams and I liked the stories about people who are tremendously successful lucid dreamers, and ways to improve the chances of having lucid dreams.The section on "the watch" changed the way I looked at sleep. Our modern expectation is that we will have an Ambien night - go to bet, konk out, and wake up in the morning remembering nothing of the night while we were asleep. Historically, the author tells s, people fully expected to lie awake for a while in the middle of the night. It turns out that this is, to quote the Talking Heads, a "good place to get some thinking done."This book has actually changed my life, in a sense, because I now no longer dread lying awake for a while in the middle of the night, but see it as a positive thing. Plus, f you no longer fear "the watch" it doesn't last as long. If I'm not afraid of being awake for a while I get back to sleep much more quickly.The second half on waking consciousness, regrettably, was not nearly as interesting.But seriously, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who ever sleeps (or is awake). Ha ha - sleep is a huge part of our lives, but how much do we even know about it?
