We spend a third of our lives asleep and the quality and length of sleep we get can have a huge impact on our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. That’s well understood by the organisers of this year’s World Sleep Day (18 March) who see sleep as a foundational pillar of human health.
No wonder then, that books on the topic, both fiction and non-fiction, abound, looking to lift the covers on our obsession with sleep and dreams.
Here are seven of the best to enjoy in the run-up to World Sleep Day.
1. The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
In Walker’s second novel – a follow-up to her dystopian debut The Age of Miracles – a California college campus is ground zero for an inexplicable sleeping sickness.
As the sickness spreads, the towns cast of characters react to the outbreak in different and unpredictable ways.
As a police cordon quarantines the town, a young student, an ageing professor, and new parents struggling to repair their troubled marriage battle fear, paranoia, and morality in a bid to survive.
2. After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Bestselling Japanese author Murakami is arguably best known for his novels Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84.
After Dark, published in English in 2007, takes place during one Tokyo night. While Mari sips coffee in an all-night diner, her beautiful sister Eri is at home in a deep, heavy, and “too perfect” sleep. She has been asleep for two months.
Mari’s night will see her cross paths with a trombone-playing student, a retired female wrestler, and the Chinese mafia.
Meanwhile, as Eri sleeps alone in her room a flicker passes over the television set, though it isn’t plugged in.
Dreamlike and spellbinding, over the course of seven hours, the surreal and the mundane combine in a haunting and unforgettable meditation on sleep and consciousness.
3. Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Resetby Alice Robb
Research scientist Alice Robb was on a research trip to Peru when she became fascinated with dreams. More specifically, she enjoyed her particularly lucid dreams and the way that, while within them, she had some semblance of control over the direction they took.
Why We Dream delves into the latest scientific advances into the nature of dreams, as well as digging out older research in the field.
The science of how is combined with a more personal look at why, and what our dreams can tell us, and even possibly reach us.
4. The Nocturnal Brainby Dr Guy Leschziner
Subtitled Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep, Dr Leschziner’s The Nocturnal Brain is a book in the tradition of Oliver Sack’s The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
Through compassionate studies of his former patients, Leschziner lets the reader into a world of insomnia, narcolepsy, apnoea, and sleepwalking, where the effects of troubled sleep include dangerous “sleep-driving”, uncontrollable aggression, and paralysing hallucinations.
5. The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe is the author of 19 books, including novels, books for children, and non-fiction works that include biographies of Hollywood legends Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart. Among his best-known works is the 1994 satire What A Carve Up!
In The House of Sleep, a group of students experience love and loss and the drifting apart of adulthood before their collective obsession with sleep brings their lives crashing back together.
Insomnia, narcolepsy, and an obsession with sleep’s complete eradication all shape the lives of the inhabitants of the house of sleep and will have far-reaching consequences.
Coe’s biting wit will, according to the Guardian, “make you laugh out loud and […] make your heart ache.”
6. Insomnia by Stephen King
In Derry, Maine – a fictional town that appears in many of King’s works – retiree Ralph Roberts can’t sleep.
He is suffering from sleep-maintenance insomnia, meaning he struggles to get back to sleep once he’s woken up. And he’s waking up earlier and earlier.
As he gets by on shorter amounts of sleep, Ralph begins to see things. First, colourful plays of light – or “auras” – appear around the people he meets. Next, small, bald little doctors in white coats haunt his waking hours.
As Ralph begins to suspect that these visions are real, and not sleep-deprived hallucinations, he becomes embroiled in a battle between good and evil.
Insomnia was nominated for a Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in 1994.
7. Sleep Demons: An Insomnia’s Memoirby Bill Hayes
For author Bill Hayes, bouts of sleepwalking aged eight led to a difficult relationship with sleep into adulthood.
In Sleep Demons, Hayes takes a closer look at insomnia, hypersomnia, narcolepsy, and other more common issues related to sleep like jet lag and snoring.
Combining personal experience with the research of sleep-science pioneer Nathaniel Kleitman, Hayes weaves a story that stretches from the 1920s to 1980s San Francisco at the height of the Aids epidemic.
