When Bill Hayes was a child, the question, "How'd you sleep?" was a topic of genuine reflection at his family's breakfast table. Even then, Hayes slept poorly. His mind would race, "lighting on images, moments, fragments of conversation, impossible to turn off." He also walked in his sleep. Today, in midlife, he still has trouble falling asleep and says he approaches each night with trepidation.

Hayes, a San Francisco writer, has channeled his equally restive imagination into an exploration of the nature of sleep from ancient times to the present. He presents his findings with a graceful and often poetic spin. Indeed, in his choice of title, he likens himself to Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious raven, whose eyes, "have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming."

Aristotle saw sleep, Hayes tells us, as "the evil twin of wakefulness." Marie de Manacéine, one of the first female physicians in Russia, showed in 1894 that puppies died when kept awake for up to six days. This experiment, Hayes writes, "tarnishes my image of her." He vividly paints pioneer sleep researcher Eugene Aserinsky's long nights fumbling with the balky brain wave monitors of the early 1950s, wondering whether the "jerky eye movements" he was the first to see had any import, feeling frustrated by lack of encouragement from the scientist who had hired him, Nathaniel Kleitman, never getting the full recognition he deserved.

Hayes tried, without success, to arrange a meeting with Kleitman, widely viewed as the father of modern sleep research. Rejection notes from Kleitman's daughters prompt riffs on Kleitman's studies, including a 32-day stay in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave in 1938 where Kleitman tried, but failed, to flout the dictates of his inner clock and live on a non-24-hour day. Kleitman died in 1999 at age 104.

Hayes describes caffeinism, recounting his own first hand experience. Throughout his childhood, his father ran a Coca-Cola factory in Spokane. "As the milkman delivered milk in the morning," he writes, "so Dad brought home pop at night." He visits a mattress factory, regaling us with details on bedsprings and cotton ticking. He bought an ad in the New York Times, asking insomniacs, people with sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and other sleep disorders, nightmare sufferers, sleepwalkers, and others to share their stories with him. He weaves their experiences through the book.

Along with these reports, Hayes offers a personal memoir, telling us about his insomniac father, and nightowl mother, his recognition and acceptance of his homosexuality, and the toll AIDS has exacted from people he knows and loves, including Steve, his partner for the past 10 years. These anecdotes are not mere digression. Why should we care about sleeping well, Hayes wonders, if not to improve the quality of our waking lives?

Hayes visits a sleep center, hoping to uncover the secrets of his poor sleep. He's chagrined to learn that, like many insomniacs, his irregular hours and heavy use of sleeping pills may be making his sleep worse. Following the sleep specialist's advice, he starts to keep a worry diary to help reduce bedtime fretting. He goes outside in the morning to get sun exposure to anchor his body clock, and avoids caffeine late in the day. "I came to feel, more often than not, that I was in control of sleep rather than controlled by sleeplessness," he writes. "In the nightly tug-of-war, I held a slight edge."

Readers will enjoy sharing Haye's meandering journey to the Land of Nod.

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