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THE QUIET SLEEP - UNDERSTANDING INSOMNIA, OVERTHINKING AND INNER RESTLESSNESS
When nothing disturbs you anymore and you stop avoiding yourself
Volume 8 of the series OUR TIME
A young man sits on a train. He has fallen asleep. Women stand around him, holding on, waiting or looking away. He notices none of them. In the middle of life, and yet for a moment completely removed from it.
Sleep can look remarkably simple. Until it isn’t. Many people notice the difference at night, when the day becomes quiet and the usual distractions disappear. Then the thoughts begin. Restlessness. Lying awake. The peculiar experience of becoming more awake the harder you try to fall asleep.
THE QUIET SLEEP asks whether some forms of insomnia, overthinking and inner restlessness may have less to do with sleep itself than with what becomes noticeable when everything else grows quiet. Rather than treating sleep as another technique to master, the book explores it as a reflection of inner life: thoughts that continue, emotions that remain unresolved, boundaries we cross during the day and tension that becomes harder to ignore at night.
This is not about fixing anyone. There are already enough things to think about at three in the morning.
Instead, the book combines personal experience and quiet observation to explore what keeps us awake – and what may allow something inside us to become still again.
A QUIET SLEEP is for people who function perfectly well during the day but find that their minds have rather different plans once the lights go out.
It explores sleep and overthinking, inner restlessness and emotional tension, adaptation and personal boundaries – not as a diagnosis, but as a way of looking more closely at what becomes visible when daytime distractions disappear.
This is not a conventional sleep guide. There are no techniques for falling asleep, no bedtime programme and no promise that seven carefully followed steps will have you sleeping peacefully tomorrow night.
Perhaps that already takes a little pressure off.
Instead, A QUIET SLEEP asks what our sleepless nights may sometimes reveal about the lives we are living while awake. Not every sleep problem begins in the mind, and not every restless night carries a deeper message. But sometimes sleep reflects something we have become remarkably good at overlooking during the day.
This book does not tell you how to sleep.
It asks what happens when there is finally nothing left to distract you.
Because quiet sleep may begin long before bedtime – where something inside us no longer needs to keep making noise.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience – from setbacks, detours, new beginnings and encounters that never needed to be invented. His texts begin where real life leaves its mark.
If you have not yet read a volume from the book series “OUR TIME”, you can begin with one of the following books. Each volume stands on its own and explores a different aspect of our lives.
Volume 2: THE DOG CATCHERS OF BLENHEIM
Volume 4: THE WORLD IN THE MIND