Sleep Coaching (®Klösch & Holzinger) Outlined

Part 1: Integrating Sleep in our Lives

Let’s start with a simple sounding question: Why do we sleep?

The answer will reveal why sleep is so precious for each of us that it easily could be labelled “the elixir of life”.

Before I get into the topic, I would like to introduce myself: My name is Brigitte Holzinger, I am a psychotherapist. For over 20 years I have been dealing with the topics of sleep, dreams and lucid dreaming. The results of my research work, my encounters with clients, the exchange with experienced physicians from a wide variety of separate subject areas have led me to believe more than ever that lack of sleep, i.e. unhealthy sleep, is one of the most serious diseases in our modern society.

Together with my esteemed colleague Gerhard Klösch, I have developed the method of sleep coaching in order to fight this disease with all means available. I held my first sleep coaching courses in 2007 at the Institute for Consciousness and Dream Research. Sleep coaching (®Klösch & Holzinger) is now offered as a 3-semester postgraduate course at the Medical University of Vienna.

Over the years, more elements were gradually added to this method until it became what I was aiming for: a fast-acting, yet sustainable method for overcoming sleep disorders.

This short publication offers an easy-to-read overview of the sleep coaching(®Klösch & Holzinger) method, which can be used to quickly acquire the fundamental knowledge to take first steps against unhealthy sleep.

It is very easy to explain why it is so important to quickly get help for people with sleep disorders:

First of all, those who sleep poorly are overtired, which can cause accidents at work or on the road. Statistics show that tiredness is the cause behind many devastating accidents, such as the famous Exxon Valdez disaster.

In addition to this accident risk, there is a long list of health consequences, both psychological and physical, that can result from insomnia. That is the reason why psychologists and medical professionals use the term “unhealthy sleep”. I would like to name a few examples from this long list right at the beginning of this article.

In the physical consequences we find: cardiovascular disorders, digestive disorders, weakened immune system, obesity, diabetes mellitus, respiratory disorders and even an increased risk of cancer.

Among the psychological consequences of unhealthy sleep, we find: depression, anxiety disorders, lack of concentration and an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

In addition, there are the consequences of so-called “dangerous sleep disorders”, such as sleep apnea, a condition that disrupts breathing during sleep for a variable amount of time. The resulting lack of oxygen makes sleep become no longer restful: those affected by it sleep longer or in the morning, they feel exhausted instead of well rested. In extreme cases, sleep apnea can even lead to cardiac arrest.

Of course, those consequences are just the first ones that come to mind, but the list is long and as we go deeper into the topic, we will add to it.

The method of Sleep Coaching(®Klösch & Holzinger) is a comprehensive method that may appear complex at first glance, but is in fact very easy to understand and to use, which increases its effectiveness even more. When my colleague Gerhard Klösch and I developed it, we naturally turned to Gestalt therapy and chose it as the basis, as the framework for our method. The Gestalt Therapy was developed by Fritz and Laura Perls and it offers great advantages that we were eager to use, I will describe those briefly, as this already helps to get a first idea of what makes Sleep Coaching(®Klösch & Holzinger) so effective.

The Gestalt regards every human being as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This is also the case with sleep or sleep disorders. Different elements from daytime and nighttime interact and, as a new whole, result in a sleeping behavior, which can also be called a life behavior that results from the experiences of the previous days. It involves how we behave, how we are, but also what happens around us, our environment or rather the field, as it is called in Gestalt therapy. The field is composed by not only the own home, the family, the friends, but also the street, the city, the country, etc.

The Self within the field makes each of us unique. With this individuality comes the necessity to develop a method that is flexible enough to be adapted to each person’s individual needs.

The goal of the Gestalt is already contained in the name (Gestalt is the German word for “shape”, for “form”, for a “character” and many more translations are possible): We are a Gestalt that strives for completeness. There are elements of our being, of our Gestalt that we may not have integrated, that we have repressed, that are ambivalent. Separated elements of our inner self want to be integrated and these tend to burden our unconscious, which is often expressed in dreams or nightmares, and can therefore also deprive us of our sleep.

The Gestalt, thanks to its flexibility, made it easily possible to integrate four much needed sleep coaching(®Klösch & Holzinger) elements into our method:

• Sleep education

• Cognitive behavior therapy

• Hypnosis, meditation and relaxation techniques

• Dream work and overcoming nightmares

These four elements in interaction with the Gestalt complement each other in order to quickly promote healthy sleep and / or to overcome unhealthy sleep while, at the same time, also a long-lasting effect is obtained.

Again, I am using the term unhealthy sleep, but why can sleep be healthy or unhealthy? The explanation lies in my opening question, to which I now return: Why do we sleep?

The answer to this question is part of sleep education, the first element of sleep coaching(®Klösch & Holzinger) which I will address in the next part of this article. Beforehand let me point out what a sleep coach is or should be and why Gestalt plays a key role as a basis.

Why choosing The Gestalt method?

A sleep coach is not necessarily a psychotherapist or a medical practitioner, this is the main reason why we talk about a sleep coach and not about a sleep therapist. Our method is based on Gestalt, which includes: Gestalt Theory, Gestalt Therapy and Gestalt Psychology.

Many people who are not familiar with the psychotherapeutic world, probably never heard of the importance of the different methods. The difference is not only in the methodology but also in the goal of the therapy itself.

Depending on the belief system of the psychotherapeutic method, what is understood by success differs:

● In Behavioral therapy, the psychotherapy is successful when the symptom disappears,

● In depth psychology, success consists in the elimination of internal conflicts,

● In Jung’s psychology, success could be defined as dealing with the archetypes

● In Gestalt therapy it could be successful when the process of self-growth and inner freedom is started,

Those are just a few examples, to point out how important the choice of a therapeutic school can be. The sleep coaching method is inclusive. The Gestalt based process of self-growth and inner freedom is the starting point, from which the sleep deprived person can find to the strength and the self-responsibility needed to pursue the main goal: healthy sleep. This is the great advantage of Gestalt: it does offer enough freedom and space in its state of mind and in its methodology to include all which is needed to achieve that goal. It even makes it possible to include elements of the many other psychological schools.

Getting into the Gestalt mindset

First a few words about Gestalt therapy as such: It was essentially founded by Fritz Perls (1893–1970) and his wife Laura (1905–1989). Its roots can be found in Gestalt theory and in Gestalt psychology on the one hand, and in psychoanalysis on the other one. It was also influenced by existentialism, ideas of Taoism, acting methods or individual authors such as Martin Buber and Paul Tillich.

The main idea of Gestalt (theory) is that the Gestalt (as a reminder: German for “shape”, “form”, “figure” mostly related to a person) is a whole, a complete, self-contained whole. One of the first Gestalt theorists was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932); following famous sentence goes back to him: “The whole is something different than the sum of its individual parts.” Other important fathers of Gestalt theory and Gestalt psychology are Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) and Wolfgang Metzger (1899–1979).

An open Gestalt urges for perfection, urges for completion, urges for closure (Metzger 1936), because otherwise the so-called unfinished business pursues us in our thoughts and fantasies. “Was there not something I still had to do” or “This keeps on bothering me” or “At some point I have to call someone to put this or that straight.” Such elements will keep coming back to us, until we decide to deal with them: only at this point can we integrate those elements into our inner selves and get closer to complete our Gestalt. Already those few previous sentences probably illustrate well how an open Gestalt can negatively influence our sleep by provoking bad dreams, preventing to fall asleep or by disrupting the sleep. Those elements need to be addressed.

Gestalt therapy is based on an equation: Awareness = the present = reality. In Gestalt therapy we try to bring the obvious to light: what appears on the surface, what can be perceived by or through the patient, i.e. can be seen, heard or smelled will be made clear. The resulting Gestalt can be worked upon in the frame of the therapist-patient relationship (Holzinger, Klösch 2013). We understand every flight into the future or into the past as a defiance to the current encounter. Our goal is for patients to regain their lost potential, learn to integrate conflicting polarities and learn to understand the difference between playing games and authentic behavior. In this “safe emergency situation” of the therapy situation or the coaching session, the patients/clients begin to take risks and to rely more and more on their own resources. Once they have learned to stand on their own two feet, emotionally, intellectually and economically, the need for therapy or coaching becomes obsolete.

In Gestalt therapy, we don’t ask so much about the why, but about how and what. E.g. what is the structure of our life script and how can we re-structure or rewrite it, if necessary? There is a link to behavioral therapy in this: both schools help to give to the clients the awareness of their current state and the means to address issues. Now the reason why we have structured our sleep coaching program the way we did becomes self-explanatory:

· We start with sleep education, thus we give the means to find out more about sleep, to understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy sleep and in which way the sleep conditions manifests. At this stage we reach awareness of the present state.

· In the next element, Cognitive Behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), we provide all the means necessary to address sleep related issues which we now are aware of. The self-responsibility which is part of the Gestalt will enable the affected person to choose from all the means provided. The sleep deprived person knows best (not the coach) which of the provided means address their issues and can be implemented in the daily routine. As the choices are being made by the clients themselves, the phenomenon of resistance can be avoided.

· The third element of sleep coaching is meditation and hypnosis: this one builds on both previous elements and addresses stress related issues, as those are the biggest sleep thefts of all. Some of the meditation techniques can be quite physical, which unavoidably reminds us of the very old but nonetheless very accurate quote of Plato: “mens sana in corpore sano” (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”). Gestalt was not even a notion back in the antique Greek society, but this quote of his matches perfectly the mindset of the Gestalt and its wish to incorporate all the loose elements into the one, final, whole, harmonious Gestalt involving body and mind.

· Now how does the last element of Sleep Coaching fit into our Gestalt world? Dream work is the element which is providing the long-lasting effect of the sleep coaching method. In Gestalt therapy we assume that dreams hold existential messages for us. Those are elements known by our unconscious, but often we are not consciously aware of them. We call those elements split-off or repressed. They are expressed in our dreams, often they turn our dreams into nightmares and prevent healthy sleep. Learning to remember our dreams better and to find out what their messages mean is what will prevent falling back into a sleep deprived mode: the split off or repressed elements can be uncovered and integrated into the Gestalt, thus they stop coming back to us and disrupting our sleep.

When working with dreams, the therapist or coach is tempted to try to interpret. As any coach in any setting, like in sports for example, we are considering a fact or a situation from the outside, from the sideline. This sometimes gives us the feeling, that we are able to perceive better what the dreamer had repressed: the temptation is big to help in the uncovering process. Even though the intention is good, the issue at hand is that we are not talking about sports. A dream cannot be understood better by the coach, it simply won’t work. Only the dreamer can understand the message of his dreams. This has a lot to do with what the Gestalt therapist calls the “field”, a very important aspect of Gestalt and also of our Sleep Coaching method. This notion was brought up by Kurt Lewin in 1963. By the “Field”, we understand way more than only the surrounding, the setting. The interaction between us and the field is what is shaping who we are, is inherently part of our inner self. The field expands as we take it into consideration: it starts in our room, house, family, street, friends, work space or school, colleagues, town, religion, country, folks, continent, climate… all elements big or small have an effect on our inner-selves, they interact with our personality and shape it as much as we shape our field by the choices we make. When we encounter a repressed memory in our dream, we might have repressed it for many reasons, often those reasons are connected to this one unconscious idea: “it does not fit in the image we have created from ourselves in order to fit in our field.” Each field is very specific to one person, which makes every element expressed in our dream typical for us, it cannot be understood and interpreted by any other person than the dreamer, who is the only one who knows this specific field, which in interaction with the personality and the self-image has created the dream message with the corresponding imagery. We also could at this point go to another psychotherapeutic school and address the archetype as described by Jung. The archetype is the inherent need and perception that comes by birth and is common to all of us. The need of a caring mother for example. Now melting Gestalt and Jung’s theories: A neurosis or an inhibition might be rooted in needs of the archetypes not met within the field. Gestalt offers the possibility to integrate this split-off part of the self into the Gestalt, to integrate this pain into the self, thus to overcome its negative effects including the sleep related issues.

Special Case Lockdowns and Covid-19 Pandemics: the effect on the Field

While I am writing those lines, we all are living through strange, disturbing times. The WHO, the politicians, the many now suddenly famous doctors and the news outlets talk about a global pandemic. A virus called SarsCov-2 hit the world, needs to be fought and eradicated. The many measures put in place to prevent the further spread of the virus involve lockdowns, mandatory wearing of masks, quarantines, curfews, travel bans and many more: many of the wordings used in our situation is reminding war rhetoric. In addition to it, also some of the measures remind war situations, like the declared emergency acts and the curfew measures, which in many countries were last seen in long gone war times. The measures taken differ strongly according to the countries. Some have drastic measures while others have nearly no measures at all, which leads to even more creating an atmosphere of fear and doubt. Medical studies are being made which contradict each other. While some prove the effectivity of the masks, some prove that wearing them are harmful. Some studies prove the effectivity of lockdowns, some prove their lack of effectiveness. Even on the topic of vaccines different studies come to different conclusions. The only facts everyone seems to agree on is that the economy will suffer globally from the measures in place to fight the spreading of the virus. Existential fears are spreading, in many third world countries food shortage is a very real threat, while in first world countries loss of jobs and perspective, resulting in poverty, seems to be the biggest fear. The first small companies and independent workers already declared bankruptcy.

From the point of view of a sleep coach the pandemic also is a pandemic of unhealthy sleep. Psychotherapists from many different countries, including myself, came together to study this aspect of the pandemic. We have developed a questionnaire and are now conduction studies in our respective countries to assess the damage that has hit peoples’ lives. Our goal is to fully grasp what we deal with in order to effectively counter the negative effects on the human psyche and the correlated issue of unhealthy sleep. In the beginning of this article, I described how important sleep is for our health and for our immune system: especially in times of a spreading virus, keeping our immune system strong is very important.

We are seeing different threats to healthy sleep: anxiety disorders and the negative stress level (distress) are rising. From a psychotherapeutically point of view, the origin of the stress does not make a difference. I still will list here some of them and will explain afterwards why it matters to know them.

· Fear of the disease due to the virus (getting it or spreading it within family and friends)

· Fear of any disease and not finding treatment due to hospitals being on the brink of collapse

· Fear of not getting vaccinated in time

· Fear of the side effects of the vaccine

· Fear of being quarantined

· Fear of losing the job or/and the income (leading to poverty, loss of home and so on)

· Fear of governmental overreach (mandatory tests, digital vaccination passport…)

· Fear of arguments within friends and family circles

· Fear of people spreading the virus by breaking the safety rules in place

· Fear of being charged for not following all rules in place

· Loss of social contacts (elderly people, children, students and people living alone)

· Loss of contact to the family (especially for elderly people in nursing homes)

· Loss of freedom on a short term

· Loss of freedom on a long term (for example: travel bans for non-vaccinated people)

The reason why I listed many of the issues people are dealing with, is to try to bring people a little closer together. We are observing that people who trust the government and their medical advisers are confronting and being confronted by people who distrust the government and their medical advisers. Those two groups of people, as you can see on the listing above, are equally suffering from the situation. The arguments between them are currently having a very destructive effect on the families’ unity and are also bringing friends apart. Understanding that we are all dealing with the same difficult situation, even though leading to different kind of fears and issues, might help to prevent further escalation between those two groups of people. Conflicts also lead to further anxiety disorders and also to depressions, both of those can further on lead to sleep disorders.

If we go back to the topic of the “field”, then we realize that what we are all facing is a sudden shift in our field. We cannot rely on what we used to know anymore: in the past, we have adapted our inner selves and our lives in order to interact with the field, we have developed our personality in interaction with the field, but now the field has changed so drastically, that we do not know it anymore and cannot properly find ourselves within it the same way we used to do. Facing a crisis situation for a short period of time can be a challenge, but our inner self knows that the field will go back to normal soon, or is just a little disturbed. As an example: floods are a catastrophe, might damage the house, but floods will eventually go back, insurances will cover the damage, the house will be habitable again and life as we know it will be restored (of course some floods are more damaging and lead to more sufferings- let me assume, that in my example, there are no casualties). Furthermore, those floods affected people in a certain area, but they did not prevent the rest of the world to function as usually: meaning, the field was not seriously affected. Insurances were still in place, maybe a hotel was there to have a place to stay while renovating, schools were still there, or reopened some weeks later, holidays could still be planned, jobs still were in place… As terrible as such situations are, they still did not affect life on the level such as the current pandemic, in which not only our own situation is uncertain, but the whole field is affected, with no real end to it in sight. What is being labelled already as “the new normal” is a shift in the field.

While most of us are aware of stress resulting from immediate fears and losses according to the list above, the shift in our field might be something we are only facing unconsciously. It might translate in dreams or nightmares; it might also prevent healthy sleep altogether if not addressed. Calling it “new normal” might be helpful for some people, but the reassuring wording might also prevent some of us to actually be aware of its impact on our lives and to address it. However, it is not the role of a sleep coach to tell how it should be addressed. As stated earlier, Gestalt does not influence the patients/clients, it helps to raise awareness and to strengthen them by consciously addressing repressed, suppressed or split-off elements. How the shift in the field is affecting each of us differs individually. For those to whom it prevents healthy sleep, many of the elements of sleep coaching which I will get into in the next parts, will provide the necessary means to address the sleep related issue even if the origin of this issue is beyond our control. Actually, loss of control while facing an event threatening our safety can be traumatizing and, in some cases, can even lead to a post-traumatic stress disorder. I will get back to this topic more specifically in the last part about dream work. One more final sentence to this topic for now: Even in times of crisis, it is possible to find sleep, thus, promote health and with it, feel energized and strong enough to face the crisis.

Sleep, past and present

In our History, the world faced a lot of crisis. Our ancestors had no social security, a very low longevity, no hospitals (at least not effective ones) and pandemics were not rare at all. We had diseases like the black plague that eradicated a big percentage of the population, humanity faced numerous wars and battles. Many people worked about 14 hours a day, life expectancy all together was at about 35 years, which we now consider still a young age. Looking back to those times, most of us probably are just bewildered that people from back then could fall asleep at all! Of course, much information about how our ancestors dealt with sleep and sleep issues have been lost, as psychotherapy wasn’t even a topic yet.

Still, from the data and information we have, we can find out that there indeed is much that we could learn about sleep from our ancestors.

I would like to start in Ancient Greece, where it was believed that half of our lives were owned by the god of sleep Hypnos (renamed Somnus in Latin within the Roman Empire) who lived on a dream Island named Lemnos. It is not really astounding that his brother Thanatos was believed to be the personification of death. Until nowadays, sleep and death are often falsely being mentioned together. One of the most famous quotes that I really love (even though I totally disagree with it) is from Edgar Allen Poe: “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.” Sleep is far from similar to death, quite the contrary! While we sleep our, brain shows a lot of activity, it does not only translate into dreams, it also has a major physical effect: our body gets cleaned off from toxins accumulated during the day, sleep is regenerating, we could even go as far as to say that it is rejuvenating. The ancient Greeks had a good feel for that, they used the power of sleep for healing purposes in their Asclepeions, healing temples dedicated to Asclepius, a son of Apollo and a mortal woman. In those temples one of the treatment techniques included a drug induced sleep after which the patient’s dream content was considered prophetic about how to treat the disease and what the outcome of the treatment might be. Further: bathing, purification ceremonies and diets all were part of the treatment. No wonder that people had high praise for those healing temples: wellness and relaxation techniques indeed provide a lot of relief to stress related issues and help to find back to healthy sleep, thus to a better functioning immune system.

Now let us leave the healing temples and go to the Middle Age in Europe. While nowadays we try to get all the amount of the sleeping hours that we need at one time (average of 7 to 8 hours during the night), we know now that many people used to cut the sleeping hours in two halves. That would mean that in Middle Age people often had biphasic sleep instead of the monophasic sleep we claim nowadays as being the only path to healthy sleep. Scientific studies are still needed for having certainty about the effect of biphasic sleep, but would it not be interesting, if we had to revise this modern view on healthy sleep after all? The reason why many people got up at night after about 4 hours of sleep was to take care of the wood heating the room. Once they were up, they had a little snack, a chat with other woken up family members, before they all went back to sleep for enjoying sleep in the second half of the night. We have to take note of the fact, that necessity to keep the fire going was important only in the winter, a season in which the daylight hours are reduced in anyway, preventing many of the prevalent tasks from the Middle Age. Tasks like farming already are reduced in the winter due to the cold, but also taking care of the cattle would require at least some light. That left the farmers among our ancestors much time in the winter to spare energy (we actually do spare energy while sleeping), thus use less food, and to rest from the work intense seasonal tasks of spring, summer and winter. Only after the industrialization and the invention of electrical light did the times of widespread biphasic sleep come to an end. What is good to know for the many people (in particular elderly people) who wake up at night and need to go to the bath: historically, biphasic sleep was the norm and it did not seem to negatively affect anyone. That should take off some stressful thoughts from many people’s shoulders!

Now one more phenomenon which is absolutely new in sleep History is sleeping alone. From beginning of humanity, being alone was dangerous, sometimes even deadly. While mammoths were still roaming the earth, our ancestors were still living in caves. Many predators roamed the earth, other dangers such as rival tribes were a tangible threat too. This led the first humans to stick together also while sleeping and to always have someone awake to keep watch. Later on, through millennia and centuries, humans still stayed together. Women helped each other to take good care of babies and infants, while watching over the group, sticking close to each other would also help to keep warm in the not yet nicely isolated housings. Even until the beginning of the 20th Century, many families still slept in one room and even in one bed, maybe not anymore for safety reasons, but for sure in order to keep each other warm in the winter. Only recently did humanity start to sleep in single beds, each in their own room, but while in the first world we tend to believe that this is a custom everywhere, we do actually know better. In many countries, families still sleep together, and this for the same reasons than in all times of human evolution: lack of space, safety and warmth. What actually is best for us is probably a matter of in which field one grew up. One study from my colleague Gerhard Klösch was very enlightening though: men tend to sleep better when a woman sleeps near them, while women tend to sleep better when they are alone. The explanation to that observation might be found in our evolutionary background: women were taking care of the babies and infants, thus, they were watching over all sleepers and sounding the alarm when danger came up. The modern man might still feel protected when sleeping near a woman, unconsciously believing she is keeping watch. On the other side, women’s sleep gets lighter when someone else is in the room, because they unconsciously feel obliged to keep watch, like their female ancestors used to do since beginning of humanity. Though this explanation might only be a theory, we actually do know that on a hormonal level, we are still nearly the same than we used to be in the Paleolithic era and our sleep actually is induced and controlled by hormones.

I would like to end my travel through human evolution to more recent and dramatic moments in History: wars. Soldiers are in the front row of wars, at least it used to be that way in the wars of the early 20th century. Most of us are lucky enough to know those times only through documentaries or more or less realistic movies. We all have in mind images of soldiers marching very long distances to reach the front or to come back from it. Many of those soldiers suffered from exhaustion, not only because of the incredible sufferings they went through while combatting, but also because of the marches they had to endure for days with no time to stop and to getting some rest. To continue to function, the human body and also the human brain needs to sleep. This is actually the reason why sleep deprivation also is used as a torture technique. The soldiers solved the sleep issue by sleeping while walking. This is no real sleep, of course, but it allows at least the brain to go into a resting mode for a while. The “sleeping” soldiers were put in the middle of the marching regiment, in order for those who were still awake to walk left and right of their comrades and keeping the marching direction. After a few hours, those soldiers exchanged their place, so that each one of them could get those resting periods. During the same second world war, children were seen sleeping in the bomb shelters while outside bombs fell over their heads. What we can learn from those two examples is that sleep occurs, no matter how bad the surrounding conditions are, no matter how much we try not to give in to sleep. Our very nature needs sleep to survive: without sleep, we do not function properly, we cannot regenerate anymore and we cannot think clearly. Instinctively, we know that, but despite of it, in many modern societies, we have banned sleep into “the loss of time” corner.

Conclusion

Nowadays, we are far from the mindset of our Greek ancestors who dedicated a deity and hospitals to sleep. We now often hear phrases suggesting that only lazy people like to sleep or to take a nap, we even feel guilty for our lack of productivity when we go to sleep and we admire people who pretend needing no more than four hours of sleep per night. Those are dangerous thoughts: actually, people who have a healthy sleep are way more productive, as they actually can focus properly on what they are doing. In Asian countries there is no shame in taking naps, and luckily, we start taking this as an example in our western civilization: some companies book sleep coaches for helping their employees to cope with shift work, others allow their employees to take naps during the day, as they realized that the increased productivity resulting from this was an advantage for the company. Nevertheless, we still feel like hiding, as if we need to be ashamed, when we want to nap: luckily, progress is in sight. I hope that through these lines and the detailed information in the next parts, I will be able to give back to the worlds of sleep and dreams the importance it deserves.