Excerpt from The Mystery of Sleep In the year 1896 I gave to the public a monograph in which I endeavored to expose and unsettle, if not dispel, some popular delusions - as I regarded them - about sleep. Of these is the notion that sleep is merely a state of rest, of practical inertia of soul and body, or, at most, a periodical provision for the reparation of physical waste in the sense that a well, exhausted during the day, fills up in the hours of the night. I also tried to give some reasons for my conviction that no part of our lives is consecrated to nobler or more important uses than that usually spent in sleep, or contributes more - if so much - to differentiate us from the beasts that perish. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.