Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, has made the one-third netherworld of sleep his life's work, and when you're a reader in his hands, it's hard not to be convinced there's nothing more important to understand than this hallucinatory, death-like interlude that nearly every living organism requires to survive. As he shows, citing study after study of recent research, we don't merely rest during sleep: we repair, we organize, we create, we restock, in our brains and in every cell of our bodies. And, crucially, too few of us (this writer included) give sleep the one-third of our time it deserves—Walker cites insufficient sleep as a contributor not just to exhaustion but to everything from depression to cancer to Alzheimer's. It made for great bedtime reading, except that I felt guilty for not putting it down and letting sleep do its good work.