Looks like In Pursuit of Sleep will be published sometime in mid January 2016. Sorry about the delay. Graphics are taking longer than expected.

This article in the Guardian is quite interesting. However, they aren’t talking about people with insomnia. They don’t address that issue until the end of the article. Then they say this:

“We shouldn’t forget that there are real sleep problems out there. There are people with insomnia, and these people cannot get to sleep even though they have the opportunity to. They deserve treatment, though whether that should be pharmacological or not is an important area of research,” he [Professor Derk-Jan Dijk] added.

Seems that the problem with insomnia is the amount of stress we in the modern world are under, and treatment with medication is highly controversial. A previous paragraph is also interesting:

Several studies have linked the chronic use of sleeping pills to a shorter life, but the pills might not be to blame. It may be that people with underlying health problems sleep worse and so take more sleeping pills. But even so, Siegel [professor of psychiatry at UCLA] points to the massive use of sleeping medicines in the US, where in 2008, pharmacists wrote out 56 million prescriptions for the pills.

And that’s just in the USA. Insomnia is an international problem. I hope when it is published In Pursuit of Sleep can help.

This article in the Guardian is a couple of months old but still worth a read. It is primarily a rant about the benefits of sleep and how not getting enough can ruin your health and life. I pretty much agree with everything he says. However, even when you decide to get more sleep, it isn’t always available. In Pursuit of Sleep will hopefully remedy this problem, so that when you want to get more sleep, you’ll know how to go get it.

Interesting article in the New York Times. It talks about a new study of sleep in “…people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years.” They found that people sleep about the same as modern Americans. And they rarely sleep during the day. Here are the most important paragraphs in the article:

The prevailing notion in sleep medicine is that humans evolved to go to bed when the sun goes down, and that by and large we stay up much later than we should because we are flooded with artificial light, said Jerome Siegel, the lead author of the new study and a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at U.C.L.A.

But Dr. Siegel and his colleagues found no evidence of this. The hunter-gatherer groups they studied, which slept outside or in crude huts, did not go to sleep when the sun went down. Usually they stayed awake three to four hours past sunset, with no light exposure other than the faint glow of a small fire that would keep animals away and provide a bit of warmth in the winter. Most days they would wake up about an hour before sunrise.

In a typical night, they slept just six and a half hours — slightly less than the average American. In the United States, most adults sleep seven hours or more a night, though a significant portion of the population sleeps less.

The assumptions that sleep experts make continue to puzzle me. It just illustrates how loosely connected the medical profession is to the reality of what people are experiencing while trying to go to sleep. Another paragraph in the article shows what I believe is even more ignorance in the scientific community:

Among sleep researchers it is widely believed that people sleep differently today than they did 150 years ago. Many argue that the invention of the electric light bulb in the late 1800s — and all the artificially lit environments that followed — dramatically changed our sleep patterns. Exposure to artificial light at night, whether from light bulbs or computer screens, throws off the body’s biological clock, delaying and reducing sleep, experts say.

They are simply shooting in the dark. I don’t believe this at all. No one studies what goes on inside the mind while the subject is trying to go to sleep. People are experiencing insomnia, but it is not caused by anything pointed out in these random guesses. I hope to expose the real problem and how to solve it when I publish In Pursuit of Sleep sometime in November.

Interesting article on the NPR Website concerning the close connection between the sleep of fruit flies and that of humans. Fruit flies sleep at night and stay awake during daytime. Fruit flies also have insomnia, and they need sleep to function properly. Therefore, fruit flies are viewed as good research subjects to solve human insomnia problems. Of course the goal is to “to make possible a new generation of sleeping pills that gently tweak the brain pathways associated with a specific type of insomnia.” Not getting to sleep successfully when first getting into bed is  termed “sleep onset insomnia.” And getting to sleep initially, waking and then not being able to get back to sleep is called “sleep maintenance insomnia.” Medication is used for the first type and not the latter because of morning drowsiness. This research is about finding medication for sleep maintenance insomnia.

This is an interesting article, but it again points out all the research being done on medication to get you to sleep instead of investigating what is going on psychically that is keeping you from going to sleep. All medications have side effects. Getting to sleep naturally does not. That’s where In Pursuit of Sleep will come in. Plus, it will work for both types of insomnia.

A new study by the University of California — San Francisco reinforces the idea that to stay healthy we need to get plenty of sleep.

“…people who sleep six hours a night or less are four times more likely to catch a cold when exposed to the virus, compared to those who spend more than seven hours a night in slumber land.”

The lead author of the study was  Aric Prather, PhD, assistant professor of Psychiatry at UCSF, who also said that, “Short sleep was more important than any other factor in predicting subjects’ likelihood of catching cold.”

Not only that:

“…previous studies have shown that people who sleep fewer hours are less protected against illness after receiving a vaccine. Other studies have confirmed that sleep is among the factors that regulate T-cell levels.”

Hopefully, In Pursuit of Sleep will be able to help when it is published in the October/November timeframe. Stay tuned for updates.

In Pursuit of Sleep pre-release cover

[UPDATE: Looks like mid January 2016 for publication of “In Pursuit of Sleep.” Graphics took longer than expected. Sorry.]

From the author:

This book is an outgrowth of sixty-five years of experimentation and research. I’ve had difficulty sleeping since I was a kid. At the age of eight, I had an imaginary girlfriend who went on adventures with me while I waited for sleep to overtake me. (That girl on the cover floating above the town reminds me of her.) My father was a farmer and prone to worry over product prices and the weather, things he could do nothing anything about. I absorbed a certain amount of his insomnia and worry, and passed it along to my kids. This same story with different characters plays out every night throughout the world, and by all reports is getting worse because of the accelerating pace and complexity of modern life. This book is my attempt at turning the tide.

If you’ve been lying awake at night waiting helplessly for sleep to come, it is time you went on the offensive. This book is about pursuing sleep. It presents all the information you need to chase sleep all the way to Slumberland. This book is not about tricking yourself into going to sleep. The method developed herein is based on scientific principles and decades of research into the problems that block sleep. It builds off of what we know about sleep and the way the mind works while negotiating that gray zone between being awake and asleep. It does not involve medication. And it doesn’t take weeks of learning before you can get started. Read this today, use the method tonight.

I’m an author and an engineer with an MS from Stanford University. I have written nine books, both fiction and non-fiction, two of them on the creative process and the inter-workings of the mind close to the sleep state. I’ve experimented with dreams and lucid dreaming and how to use them creatively. I have developed a method for dealing with insomnia. Will it work for you? Perhaps. This approach isn’t something you’ll find in the literature, and it doesn’t involve medication. It doesn’t depend on meditation either. It is completely new.

If you have a job or little ones to care for, you need good sound sleep. Sleep interruptions can occur at any time during the night. Your child can wake you. You might have to go to the bathroom. Your sleeping partner can wake you for any one of a number of reasons. How do you get back to sleep under these circumstances? Perhaps this method will help you get the sleep you so badly need to get you through the day.

I’ve only taken three types of medication to get to sleep, two self-medicated and one under prescription from a doctor. The first I tried was melatonin, which is a hormone involved in circadian rhythms. It seemed to have no effect. For a couple of years I took Benadryl, three capsules at bedtime and two the first time I woke, about four or five hours later. Benadryl helped some, but I didn’t like taking so much since it does have side effects.

For six months while teaching astronomy at a university, I took Ambien, which worked well enough but didn’t seem to give me the kind of sleep I needed. When I went off it, I had ocular migraines every day for a couple of weeks. I had large blotches in my field of vision and blank spots where I could see nothing. For six months after quitting, I also had difficulty getting to sleep when I first went to bed much worse than before I took Ambien.

I started researching solutions for insomnia seriously in December 1990. I had been using all the “tricks,” like counting sheep and trying to keep my eyes open. I investigated cognitive behavior therapy, sleep hygiene, and tried meditation techniques to clear my mind of thoughts. None of it had a measurable impact. I was an engineer working on NASA missions to the outer planets and US Air Force Projects. I was also an author writing novels and accumulating material on the creative process. I became interested in the periods just before and after sleep because they seemed to be inordinately useful for many authors as well as other creative people. I developed a method of taking my characters into my dreams, and I developed work strategies and solutions for difficult engineering tasks. Sixteen years ago, I started exploring scientific literature on the period of time just before sleep and discovered a complete world of information under the title of “hypnagogia.” I then started the development of a method to solve my insomnia problem.

I am a professional but not a sleep professional, and apparently that is a good thing. Little or no rigorous research has been accomplished on techniques to direct the mind to enter sleep. Sleep research has been predominantly performed, or at least paid for, by pharmaceutical companies into medication to make the subject unconscious. This usurps the natural processes involved in going to sleep and does not achieve the same result as the patient actually being asleep. All the same, I do not recommend that you quit taking any medication that a doctor has prescribed for you. We do have extensive psychotherapy procedures to resolve psychiatric issues that flood into consciousness and co-opt the process of going to sleep, but this isn’t even necessarily the problem, and therapy can take years and have mixed results. I know because I have been there. An online search will quickly reveal methods for producing an environment conducive to sleep and even some superficial methods of tricking your mind into going to sleep. My guess is that none of them work reliably for you or you wouldn’t be reading this.

The other thing that has helped greatly in the writing of this book is that I went through five years of psychotherapy with psychiatrist. At the time, I was going through all sorts of problems, from troublesome relationships to panic attacks. I had fears of dying in my sleep. I had trouble sleeping. Although the therapy was helpful in many ways and my therapist was very good, I also came to realize the limitations. I walked away with many of the problems I came to it with, and getting to sleep was one of them. I even came away with a few problems I didn’t have when I entered therapy. As my psychiatrists told me, every treatment has it side effects, even therapeutic treatment.

What I present here appears to be the first serious research into methods to direct the mind along a path into sleep. My most fervent wish is that this book will prod sleep professionals to start research into directing the mind toward sleep. Perhaps then we, as a world of the sleep deprived, can actually do something about our insomnia without being drugged.

Will this be the answer for everyone? Probably not. Many people have more serious problems with sleep than the ones I present a solution for here. Some have brain damage and chemical imbalances. They will have to rely on professional medical help. However, I contend that any normal human being, even while suffering all the stresses of modern life, should still be able to get to sleep in less than five minutes. That certainly has been my experience.

After a year or so of practicing this technique, which I call the Transition Trek, I just let my mind freewheel to remind me how I used to try to get to sleep. Took me about an hour, when now I can get to sleep easily in less than a minute. Waiting for sleep is such a messy and ineffective way to get where you are going. It is like standing on a corner waiting for a bus when you don’t know the bus schedule or even if a bus comes down this street. You don’t “fall” asleep. Sleep doesn’t come get you. Sleep is waiting on you to come for it. I am going to show you how to go get it

The New York Times has another interesting article on sleep. I believe the author has the right idea about not relying on medication to try to get to sleep. He was helped by the professionally developed material on the CBT for Insomnia website. Undoubtedly they have a lot of helpful information, but it is expensive.

Although helpful, I still believe professional sleep specialists are missing a big piece of the getting-to-sleep puzzle, and that is the recognition of the nature of hypnagogia and a directed approach to get you through it and to sleep. This is what I present in In Pursuit of Sleep, which I am currently writing and hope to publish within a couple of months.

Here’s a nice article in the Guardian by Emma Brockes about what to do while waiting for sleep. When my book, In Pursuit of Sleep, comes out (early August?), you’ll learn how to go get sleep instead of waiting, but for now this sounds like a good idea. At least it’s a good read.

Have difficulty sleeping? You have come to the right place. If you are looking for professional help, you should search elsewhere on the Internet. I am simply an individual who had considerable difficulty sleeping and finally solved the problem. I have an MS from Stanford University and have been researching the sleep problem for decades. Perhaps the solution I found for myself will be of benefit to you. What I am offering as a solution to insomnia based on what scientists, writers, psychologists, and all sorts of creative people have learned about sleep onset, also known as hypnagogia, over the last couple hundred years. I offer no medication, supplements, or getting-to-sleep tricks. It is a tried-and-true procedure based on what happens inside the mind when it goes to sleep.

Will my method of getting to sleep help you? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to find out.

So where can I get my hands on this procedure? you ask.

Sorry, but it’s not available yet. I’m hoping to publish it sometime in early October. Return here from time to time for schedule updates.