“A lot of people in the global North and the West like to problematize their sleep,” he says. But maybe insomnia, for example, is really hypervigilance — an evolutionary superpower. “Likely that was really adaptive when our ancestors were sleeping in the savannah.”

Sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical; and from the romantic to the marketable.

We are a society of energy addicts dependent on overly stimulating foods, fluids, information, entertainment and light at night. And, of course on the extensive global network of machinery needed to manufacture and maintain this lifestyle.