Ebook: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Do you think you got enough sleep this past week? Can you recall the last time you woke up
without an alarm clock feeling refreshed, not needing caffeine? If the answer to either of these
questions is “no,” you are not alone. Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to
obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.
...
Within the space of a mere hundred years, human beings have abandoned their biologically
mandated need for adequate sleep — one that evolution spent 3,400,000 years perfecting in service
of life-support functions. As a result, the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is
having a catastrophic impact on our health, our life expectancy, our safety, our productivity, and
the education of our children.

This silent sleep loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the twenty-first
century in developed nations. If we wish to avoid the suffocating noose of sleep neglect, the
premature death it inflicts, and the sickening health it invites, a radical shift in our personal,
cultural, professional, and societal appreciation of sleep must occur.

I believe it is time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, without embarrassment or
the damaging stigma of laziness. In doing so, we can be reunited with that most powerful elixir of
wellness and vitality, dispensed through every conceivable biological pathway. Then we may
remember what it feels like to be truly awake during the day, infused with the very deepest
plenitude of being.