This first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue of Science & Spirit.

In a nation flooded with artificial lights, artificial stimulants, and, perhaps, an artificially inflated drive toward productivity and excitement, a simple good night’s rest can be surprisingly hard to find.

As you gulp your latte while driving to work, grateful for the caffeine because, once again, you didn’t get enough sleep last night, ask yourself what the tragedies on this list have in common: the run-aground Exxon Valdez gushing oil into Prince William Sound; the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands; the space shuttle Challenger disintegrating in the blue sky; and the radioactive horror of Chernobyl. According to published reports, official inquiries determined that all of these disasters occurred, at least in part, because someone involved was sleepy.

If that doesn’t grab your flagging attention, maybe some numbers will. For starters, some studies have estimated the total cost of treating sleep disorders at close to 16 billion dollars per year. The 100,000 vehicle accidents each year that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, are the consequence of drowsy driving, result in approximately 48 billion dollars per year in damage. How about the 150 billion dollars American businesses lose each year due to fatigue-related mishaps and lost productivity? On a more personal level, consider your teenager who stays up until all hours sending text messages to friends or surfing MySpace.com so that you have to drag him out of bed every morning and nag him about his once excellent grades. Might insufficient sleep have something to do with that?

We are indeed a sleep-deprived nation: As many as 70 million Americans are afflicted by chronic sleep disorders, according to a study released earlier this year by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, and upward of 30 million of those poor souls suffer specifically from chronic insomnia.

Sleep disorders are one of the most prevalent health concerns in the United States and probably throughout the industrialized world, according to psychologist Rubin Naiman, a sleep and dream medicine specialist at Doctor Andrew Weil’s Program for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, and author the book Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening. Suffering from ongoing sleep deprivation, we live, as Naiman describes it, in a state of “chronically dazed waking consciousness.”

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