Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams

Front Cover
Macmillan, 2005 - Health & Fitness - 432 pages
Does the early bird really catch the worm, or end up healthy, wealthy, and wise? Can some people really exist on just a few hours' sleep a night? Does everybody dream? Do fish dream? How did people cope before alarm clocks and caffeine? And is anybody getting enough sleep?

Even though we will devote a third of our lives to sleep, we still know remarkably little about its origins and purpose. Paul Martin's Counting Sheep answers these questions and more in this illuminating work of popular science. Even the wonders of yawning, the perils of sleepwalking, and the strange ubiquity of nocturnal erections are explained in full.

To sleep, to dream: Counting Sheep reflects the centrality of these activities to our lives and can help readers respect, understand, and extract more pleasure from that delicious time when they're lost to the world.
 

Contents

A Third of Life 35734
3
Sleepy People
19
Dead Tired
52
The Golden Chain
74
The Shapes of Sleep
89
Morpheus Undressed
113
Strange Tales of Erections and Yawning
132
Friends and Enemies of Sleep
142
From Egg to Grave
221
The Reason of Sleep
240
Bad Sleepers
257
Dark Night
271
Pickwickian Problems
291
And So to Bed
315
An Excellent Thing
330
Blessed oblivion
343

The Children of an Idle Brain?
173
A Second Life
197

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About the author (2005)

Paul Martin received a Ph.D. in behavioral biology at Cambridge University. He was a Harkness Fellow in the School of Medicine at Stanford and is the author of "The Healing Mind."

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