Night : night life, night language, sleep and dreams
(Book)

Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1994.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-279) and index.

This volume is an exploration of night and the deep resonances it has for the human race. The author provides readers an understanding of the fragile borderline between day and night, an understanding of the language of dreams, and an explanation of how dreams affect our waking selves. This work examines night in all its aspects. How do we light it? How do we inhabit it and make it safe? In what "languages" do we dream? The search moves from the neon-lit brilliance of Las Vegas to the shadowy underworld patrolled by the police. Readers visit a sleep laboratory, where scientists try to understand what happens to our bodies and in our brains when sleep claims us. The author shows how "night horrors" inspired and terrified English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, how dreams liberated the minds of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Surrealists, and how his own childhood fears provided a gateway to the secret world of the unconscious.