The Insomniacs

The wonder of nighttime comes to life in this breathtaking debut When the Insomniacs move twelve time zones away for Mrs. Insomniac's new job, the family has an impossible time adapting to the change. They try everything to fall asleep at night--take hot baths, count to one thousand, sip mugs of milk--but nothing helps. Venturing out into the dark, they learn there is a whole world still awake and a beauty in their new and unconventional schedule. Ideal for bedtime reading, this gorgeous and lyrical story celebrates nighttime's mystery and magic.

Marit Weisenberg's The Insomniacs is “a deeply beautiful story of yearning, heartache, trauma, and love” (Jennifer Niven, #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places) about two teens who discover the secrets of their neighborhood after everyone else turns out the lights. Ingrid can’t sleep. She can’t remember, either. A competitive diver, seventeen-year-old Ingrid is haunted by what she saw at the pool at a routine meet, before falling off the high dive and waking up concussed. The only thing she remembers about the moment before her dive is locking eyes with Van—her neighbor, former best friend, and forever crush—kissing his girlfriend on the sidelines. But that can’t be all. Then one sleepless night, she sees Van out her window...looking right back at her. They begin not sleeping together by night, still ignoring each other at school by day. Ingrid tells herself this is just temporary, but soon, she and Van are up every night piecing her memory back together. As Van works through his own reasons for not being able to sleep, they’re both pulled into a mystery that threatens to turn their quiet neighborhood into a darker place than they realized.

Describes the causes, effects, treatment options, and research in the field of insomnia.

“An insomniac’s ideal sleep aid—and that’s a compliment. With her collage of ruminations about sleeplessness, [Benjamin] promises no real cure . . . Her slim book is what the doctor ordered.”—The Atlantic Insomnia is on the rise. Villainous and unforgiving, it’s the enemy o f energy and focus, the thief of our repose. But can insomnia be an ally, too, a validator of the present moment, of edginess and creativity? Marina Benjamin takes on her personal experience of the condition—her struggles with it, her insomniac highs, and her dawning awareness that states of sleeplessness grant us valuable insights into the workings of our unconscious minds. Although insomnia is rarely entirely welcome, Benjamin treats it less as an affliction than as an encounter that she engages with and plumbs. She adds new dimensions to both our understanding of sleep (and going without it) and of night, and how we perceive darkness. Along the way, Insomnia trips through illuminating material from literature, art, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, and more. Benjamin pays particular attention to the relationship between women and sleep—Penelope up all night, unraveling her day’s weaving for Odysseus; the Pre–Raphaelite artists’ depictions of deeply sleeping women; and the worries that keep contemporary females awake. Insomnia is an intense, lyrical, witty, and humane exploration of a state we too often consider only superficially. “This is the song of insomnia, and I shall sing it,” Marina Benjamin declares.

Newly illustrated and available for the first time in years, a haunting novella from the uncannily imaginative author of the national bestsellers Swamplandia! and Orange World: the story of a deadly insomnia epidemic and the lengths one woman will go to to fight it. Trish Edgewater is the Slumber Corps' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in crisis--one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the ability to sleep. Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe. Run by the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Slumber Corps is at the forefront of the fight against this deadly new disease. But when Trish is confronted by "Baby A," the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious "Donor Y," whose horrific infectious nightmares are threatening to sweep through the precious sleep supply, her faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter. Fully illustrated with dreamy evocations of Russell's singular imagination and featuring a brand-new "Nightmare Appendix," Sleep Donation will keep readers up long into the night and long after haunt their dreams.

This lively collection of facts and fiction, quotations and quips, is designed to amuse, inform, and entertain the sleepless and distract them from the glare of the digital clock and the ramblings of their hyperactive mind. Illustrations throughout.

“A lovely weave of memory and science, great characters and compassionate humor” from the author of Sweat: A History of Exercise (Anne Lamott). We often think of sleep as mere stasis, a pause button we press at the end of each day. Yet sleep is full of untold mysteries—eluding us when we seek it too fervently, throwing us into surreal dream worlds when we don’t, sometimes even possessing our bodies so that they walk and talk without our conscious volition. Delving into the mysteries of his own sleep patterns, Bill Hayes marvels, “I have come to see that sleep itself tells a story.” An acclaimed journalist and memoirist—and partner of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks—Hayes has been plagued by insomnia his entire life. The science and mythology of sleep and sleeplessness form the backbone to Hayes’s narrative of his personal battles with sleep and how they colored his waking life, as he threads stories of fugitive sleep through memories of growing up in the closet, coming out to his Irish Catholic family, watching his friends fall ill during the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and finding a lover. An erudite blend of science and personal narrative, Sleep Demons offers a poignant introduction to the topics for which Hayes has since become famous, including art, eros, city life, the history of medical science, and queer identity. “This intimate and beautifully written book brings scientific research alive in a heartfelt and deeply personal narrative.” —The Guardian “Memoir, history, and science come together and apart again in a book that reads very much like a dream.” —Out magazine

Do You Have Trouble Getting To Sleep? Do You Wake Up In The Early Hours Of The Morning? Do You Want To Be In Control Of Your Sleep? BLIS(TM) is the breakthrough you've been waiting for! This is an easy to learn How-To-Get-To-Sleep technique for everyone whose lives are impacted by broken or too little sleep. This book presents a breakthrough new technique developed by Allan Baker, an aviation psychologist with over 35 years of professional experience, that will enable you to be more in control of your sleep, and will ensure you'll get more sleep when you want and need it. Working extensively with commercial pilots who often have sleep related issues, Allan has considerable experience in the psychology of sleep. In recent years he's joined the dots presented in numerous scientific studies, and has made a discovery that has previously eluded sleep researchers - the fact that you can learn to flip your own Sleep Switch. In addition to looking at existing sleep therapies and their effectiveness, BLIS(TM) For Insomniacs discusses this new discovery and shows how you can treat getting to sleep as a skill, so that it's something you can do at will, rather than something that merely happens to you.