Quick answer
The closest matches are The Promise of Sleep by William Dement, the Stanford founder of sleep medicine, and The Nocturnal Brain by the London neurologist Guy Leschziner, built from patient cases. Internal Time by Till Roenneberg shifts the focus from hours to body clocks; further down are the historians and dream researchers.
8 books to read after Why We Sleep
The Promise of SleepClosest match
Written with Christopher Vaughan, this is Dement’s account of the science and medicine of sleep, from the researcher who established Stanford’s sleep research centre: sleep debt, sleep disorders and the health cost of losing sleep. It’s the earlier version of Walker’s argument, from the man often called the American father of sleep medicine: sleep is a public-health issue most of us ignore.
The Nocturnal BrainClosest match
Leschziner leads the Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London, and each chapter follows a patient: a woman who dresses and drives while deeply asleep, a man who raids the kitchen in his sleep, a teenager with “Sleeping Beauty syndrome”. The same neuroscience as Walker, but through real cases, and with more on the disorders critics felt Why We Sleep skimmed.
Internal Time
Roenneberg, a chronobiologist in Munich, explains chronotypes, why some of us are early birds and others night owls, and argues the difference is largely biological. He coined “social jetlag” for the gap between how we sleep on free days and work days. It complicates the single eight-hour rule: the question becomes when your body clock wants you to sleep, not only how long.
Life Time
Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, explains how the body clock governs sleep, alertness, metabolism and mood, and how shift work, artificial light and ageing disrupt it, with practical ways to work with it. It gives the circadian half of the story that Walker only touches on, from one of the British researchers who study it.
Dreamland
Randall, a journalist, reports on the strange science of sleep: why we sleep at all, whether people can commit crimes while asleep, how sleep loss contributes to friendly-fire deaths in war, and what sleeping pills really do. Much of the same ground as Walker, in a curious reporter’s voice and without the prescriptions. A lighter way in.
The Circadian Code
Panda, a biologist at the Salk Institute, argues that the body’s 24-hour clock schedules sleep, digestion and hormones, and that late-night eating, artificial light and irregular sleep work against it. He’s best known for research on eating within a limited daily window. Like Walker, he links modern habits to disease through one biological system; his lever is timing rather than hours.
Why We Dream
Robb, a science journalist, became fascinated by lucid dreaming as a student and reports on the research into dream recall, lucid dreams and what dreams might be for, testing techniques like reality checks and a dream diary on herself. It takes Walker’s chapters on REM sleep and turns them into a whole, curious book on dreaming and what it may do for memory and emotion.
At Day’s Close
Ekirch, a historian, reconstructs night-time life before electric light, from crime and work to sleep itself. His research found that people often slept in two segments, a first and a second sleep. It quietly challenges the idea that one unbroken eight-hour block is natural, the historical view critics said Why We Sleep leaves out.
Frequently asked questions about books like Why We Sleep
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