46 Books Like Sing Me to Sleep

Monsters intrigue me. I’ve always enjoyed the weird and obscure – the creatures who are recognizably not human. Being a queer, autistic person, I’ve often felt as if I didn’t understand the world…or the world didn’t understand me. Reading and writing about monsters sheds a new light on the parts of myself that I was taught are undesirable. By conventional standards, the monsters in these stories are horrifying, yet they find people who love them and their monstrosity. Monsters get their happy endings – and I can get mine, too.

Monsters intrigue me. I’ve always enjoyed the weird and obscure – the creatures who are recognizably not human. Being a queer, autistic person, I’ve often felt as if I didn’t understand the world…or the world didn’t understand me. Reading and writing about monsters sheds a new light on the parts of myself that I was taught are undesirable. By conventional standards, the monsters in these stories are horrifying, yet they find people who love them and their monstrosity. Monsters get their happy endings – and I can get mine, too.

Monsters intrigue me. I’ve always enjoyed the weird and obscure – the creatures who are recognizably not human. Being a queer, autistic person, I’ve often felt as if I didn’t understand the world…or the world didn’t understand me. Reading and writing about monsters sheds a new light on the parts of myself that I was taught are undesirable. By conventional standards, the monsters in these stories are horrifying, yet they find people who love them and their monstrosity. Monsters get their happy endings – and I can get mine, too.

Monsters intrigue me. I’ve always enjoyed the weird and obscure – the creatures who are recognizably not human. Being a queer, autistic person, I’ve often felt as if I didn’t understand the world…or the world didn’t understand me. Reading and writing about monsters sheds a new light on the parts of myself that I was taught are undesirable. By conventional standards, the monsters in these stories are horrifying, yet they find people who love them and their monstrosity. Monsters get their happy endings – and I can get mine, too.

My life’s obsession with consciousness began with a mystical experience fifty years ago and this drives me still. Academic research, and writing the textbook Consciousness: An Introduction, only deepened my perplexity. What is consciousness? How does it come about? Is it produced by the brain or is that another illusion to add to illusions of self and free will? I cannot keep work separate from life, and this not-knowing has driven decades of meditation, exploring psychedelic drugs, staying alert on the edges of sleep, and many other attempts to ask difficult questions. Who am I? And what does it mean to be alive in this world? 

I’m an award-winning author of three books on near-death experiences across cultures and throughout history. I’ve had a lifelong interest in the ancient world, anthropology, myth, religions – and extraordinary phenomena such as near-death experiences. So it was natural to combine these interests, which I first did while studying Egyptology. While reading the ancient texts describing otherworld journeys after death, I was reminded of NDEs and their counterparts in medieval visionary literature. This sent me on a decades-long “otherworld journey” of my own, earning various degrees, fellowships, and awards. In addition to my other books, I’m now embarking on a second PhD project, on NDEs in Classical antiquity.

Although I had many intriguing dreams during my childhood, including fantastic flying dreams, the idea of becoming a sleep scientist never crossed my mind. All that changed during my first year in college. It was then that I experienced an exceptionally long and vivid lucid dream that changed my life; it was because of this dream that I decided to become a dream researcher. Today, I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, director of the department’s Dream Research Laboratory, and have published over 100 scientific articles and book chapters on sleep and dreams. I don’t have as many flying dreams as I once did, but I do have a really cool job while awake. 

I was born into a family of psychics and spiritualists, where dream decoding was the order of the day. I did my Bachelor's degree in Theology and English at King's College, Cambridge University, and since graduating have devoted my life to spreading the word about the healing and transformative power of dream work. I share my passion for mainstreaming dream decoding as a potent personal and spiritual growth tool through my numerous dream and spiritual awakening books, podcasts, media appearances, my Sunday Times bestselling author status, and my collaboration with scientists, neuroscientists, and psychologists researching dreams and the science of consciousness; I have earned the title Queen of Dreams.

I am a forty-five-year career educator, sharing my classrooms with students from primary school through graduate programs in creative writing. What I love most in every classroom I enter is sharing the books and stories and poems I love with my students. The best days: when I’m reading one of my favorite parts of the book out loud to the group and I look up and they laugh or gasp, or I look up and see their eyes full of joy. If it’s my own work I’m reading from, all the better!

I am an author of science fiction, as well as nonfiction, a singer/songwriter, and a Professor at Fordham University, and time travel has played a role in all of these endeavors.  I’ve written four novels and numerous stories which feature time travel, several songs (for example, “If I Traveled to the Past”), and talk about it in my classes.  The opportunity of going back in history and stopping a bad thing has always intrigued me, as has traveling to the future to see how things turn out. The paradoxes that can get in the way of that make thinking and writing and talking and singing about it even more fun.