Powerful Sleep
(2004)
by Kacper M. Postawski
review
Common-Sense Booklet on How to Get a Good Sleep
This is not a professional publication: if features a prodigious
amount of typos, spelling, grammar and syntax mistakes – obviously, no proofreading of the text has been performed. It’s clearly
a work of an amateur enthusiast, but the sheer enthusiasm of the
writer makes his product likeable and endearing. Still, the style of
writing seems sloppy or careless, or not “educated enough”. Given
that, and the author’s Polish name, readers might wonder whether the
author was a native speaker of English; but that won’t prevent you
from perusing and enjoying the slim and concise 69-page PDF file.
The very fact that it’s an unwieldy PDF file rather than a more
contemporary format like an EPUB e-book, shows that, technologically
speaking, it has by now – in terms of form only, however – become old-fashioned; what a
dramatic difference the relatively short span of years between the
original publication date (2004, which was the pre-iPhone, pre-iPad
era) and today (2013) makes! Nonetheless, the plethora of
common-sense advice given inside the book(let) is sound, and
timeless. It seems a bit high-flown to call this collection of
common-sense advice a “program”, and sell it online for dozens of
dollars; but that is immaterial to the merit or demerit of the
booklet itself. It features a handful of appendices, partly in
separate files; the author clearly took care in assembling those.
The booklet is pretty impressive in arguing for natural remedies of sleep
issues; the condemnation of artificial means, such as medication, is
very strongly worded, as is the emphasis on physical activity as one
of the prerequisites for sound sleep. Very nicely worded are
warnings against weekends
as disruptors of one’s natural sleep rhythm. For some readers, the
importance given by the author to the exposure to bright sunlight in
the course of the day, might be eye-opening (pun intended). Likewise
laudable is that the author refuses to make any false promises to
the reader: there is no quack promise of the type, “You will be able
to cut down on your sleep by 2 hours per night!” Nope: Postawski
makes it very clear, repeatedly, that unless one first improves the quality of one’s sleep (which,
in its turn, depends – perhaps primarily – on physical activity in the course
of the day), then one cannot reasonably expect to cut down on the length of one’s sleep. There is
a lot of humor in the booklet; the tone of instruction is light and
conversational, which makes the text extremely easy, effortless to
read; a memorable passage advises the reader to pour their 2-litre
bottle of pop lemonade (such as coke) down the toilet. Bottom line:
reading this booklet is not going to hurt anyone; but the stylistic
weakness, from the literary point of view, is undeniable, and a bit
of humility – in refraining from rather pompously presenting a
collection of common-sense advice as a “program” – wouldn’t have
hurt, either.
Rating: D (on a scale of A+ to F-)