The Lost Third of Our Lives: Poems

We sleep a third of each day. Daily, this causes no concern. We yawn about it. But as we expand the span considered, our time asleep grows alarmingly. By the time we are 60, we will have slept for 20 years. This does alarm us! This is the Lost Third of Our Lives addressed in this book.

Is it a total waste? What about our dreams? Do they not count? They would if we could remember them, but we don't. And this is the crux of the problem. Dreams are random and unconcatenated. If they were remembered and linked, if they could pick up where they left off yesterday, we would have a parallel satellite existence. There would be no conscious existence lost to sleep.

These and many more issues are considered in the poetic essays in these pages. Would we gain by sleeping less? How essential is sleep? Is sleep somehow connected to our life awake? Are dreams nightly commentaries of our days? Are dreams forebodings? Do dreams have psychological value? Is sleep a prelude to death? How exactly does sleep compare to death and how do they differ? These and many more questions are addressed in these essays.

In the novel, Stealing Forbidden Dreams, the author dealt with these issues by showing the life in his character's two worlds. In this book, he chose poetic essays as a format. In both works, life in all forms, awake or sleep, is our true gift. The two thirds of our lives we spend awake is our biggest treasure. But the days and years we spend asleep are not a waste. They also enrich our lives. That is the point of both works.