Wild Nights How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep so frustrating for so many people? While human history presents a vast diversity of sleeping styles, today we define a good night s sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one straight shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. The curious product of industrialization, electricity, medicine, and capitalism, this set of sleeping rules has existed for only a few centuries. Yet few seem to be able to live by them. For the world s poor, modern sleep is full of financial and physical risk; but even the well-off now require drugs and gadgets to regulate waking and sleeping. Taming sleep is big business, but it has come at an enormous cost to our well-being. In "Wild Nights, " Benjamin Reiss draws on centuries of literary, medical, and scientific writings to show how ordinary lives were upended as sleep became modern. In so doing, he offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change again today. "