How much of your waking time are you fully awake?How often do you stumble through the day on auto-pilot, half asleep and out of contact with yourself, instead of feeling connected and alive? In this astounding book, Steve Taylor suggests that our normal consciousness is really a kind of ‘sleep’ from which we sometimes ‘wake up’, into a more intense and complete reality. Waking from Sleep provides what is perhaps the first ever clear explanation of higher states of consciousness, or ‘awakening experiences’. This book examines: the methods that human beings have used throughout history to induce awakening experiences, including meditation, sex, nature, sport, psychedelic drugs and sleep deprivation how higher states of consciousness were normal and natural to some of the world’s peoples (and still are in some cases) how we can make ‘wakefulness’ our normal state again