<div>Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book,<i>Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep</i>, assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an electroencephalography recording of brainwaves in sleep) turns into a line of poetry, an act of focused consciousness?<br><br>The earliest readings of the sleeping brain, captured by EEGs in the 1930s, revealed that sleep is as active and lively as its daytime counterpart, not simply a passive state that naturally ensues when wakefulness ceases. Sleep not only assimilates the day that’s passed, but also looks forward, assembling what’s to come. To engage this concept, Huber sculpts a long poem onto the neural oscillations of sleep, in order to explore what is beneath them both: the conscious organism, the writer, and the written. In the field of the poem, where sleep is traditionally a metaphor for death, the idea that to be awake is to be alive is put to the test in a new kind of writing that invites a new kind of being.<br><br>Prefaced by a discussion on poetry, the science of sleep, and those who have sought a language of consciousness from Hans Berger to Gertrude Stein<i>Assembling the Morrow</i> proposes that entering the mystery of sleep requires a radical reframing of our biases on what it means to be conscious.</div>