Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power. In Restless in Sleep Country Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with issues of colonialism, homelessness, consumer culture, technology and privacy, the exploitation of labour, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though it almost entirely evades direct experience, sleep is the subject of a variety of potent narratives, each of which can serve to clarify and shape its role in our lives. In Canada, cultural visions of slumber circulate through such diverse forms as mattress commercials, billboards, comic books, memoirs, experimental poetry, and bedtime story phone apps. By guiding us through this imaginative landscape, Huebener shows us how to develop a critical literacy of sleep. Lying down and closing our eyes is an act that carries surprisingly high stakes, going beyond individual sleep troubles. Restless in Sleep Country illuminates the idea of sleep as a crucial site of inequity, struggle, and gratification.

These eight stories are about the relationships and interactions of ordinary, but interesting, people who find themselves in unusual situations within a recent actual historical context. In some a character confronts, interprets, or comes to terms with, the present by reflecting on the past. Most of the settings are on Vancouver Island -- Nanaimo, the Cowichan Valley, the West Coast -- and feature characters in action, in engagement with their environment. "The Night Tony Shot the Lights Out" three WWII veterans find coming home to be a difficult adjustment. "My Former Yugoslavia" in 1963 a young man travels on foot to a remote village in Bosnia to try to find the estranged sister of a friend in Duncan. "Annie Crook" a woman, age 90, contemplates her life of solitude, with reflections of her childhood and living in hardship in a coal camp 75 years earlier. "Rhymes With Love"; a 60-something white man and a 40-something Chinese woman find themselves living together temporarily in the same house. The inevitable relationship ensues, which is complicated by the fact that she is the daughter of his former lover. "That Good Cahors Wine"; a man walks into the wilderness alone on an overnight pilgrimage to see Canada's highest waterfall. "The Shed" a story of dying man's reconciliation with his former best friend whom he has blamed for a betrayal as the result of a love triangle. "Short Haul"; in a chance encounter, a man finds he is sitting in a barber shop with his childhood hockey hero. "The Interlude"; A businessman befriends an alcoholic street person and finds that they have something in common -- not enough, however, to prevent a sad ending.

Clinical practice related to sleep problems and sleep disorders has been expanding rapidly in the last few years, but scientific research is not keeping pace. Sleep apnea, insomnia, and restless legs syndrome are three examples of very common disorders for which we have little biological information. This new book cuts across a variety of medical disciplines such as neurology, pulmonology, pediatrics, internal medicine, psychiatry, psychology, otolaryngology, and nursing, as well as other medical practices with an interest in the management of sleep pathology. This area of research is not limited to very young and old patientsâ€"sleep disorders reach across all ages and ethnicities. Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation presents a structured analysis that explores the following: Improving awareness among the general public and health care professionals. Increasing investment in interdisciplinary somnology and sleep medicine research training and mentoring activities. Validating and developing new and existing technologies for diagnosis and treatment. This book will be of interest to those looking to learn more about the enormous public health burden of sleep disorders and sleep deprivation and the strikingly limited capacity of the health care enterprise to identify and treat the majority of individuals suffering from sleep problems.