Don’t Go Back to Sleep is not a guidebook. It’s not a self-help manual. It doesn’t offer 10 steps to reinvention, a morning routine that will change your life, or a formula for feeling better.
It began as a conversation—between two men, two friends, two psychologists—trying to name what it feels like to reach midlife and realise something has gone missing. What followed was not a plan, but a reckoning.
These are raw reflections about what it means to face decay, fear, burden, loss, emptiness, and failure—not as abstract concepts, but as lived experience. The quiet, ordinary kind of pain that builds up over time. The kind that shapes who we become without us noticing.
This is about what happens when we stop pretending. When we stop performing. When we start telling the truth to ourselves about who we are, what we’ve lost, and what it might take to become human again.
It’s about waking up—not in a blaze of glory, but like Rip Van Winkle, slowly, groggily, in the wreckage of a life we weren’t fully present for. It’s about learning to say no—to the roles we’ve outgrown, the personas we’ve projected, the caricatures we’ve become. And learning, maybe for the first time, to say yes. A quiet, honest yes. One that begins again.
If you’ve ever felt like something essential has slipped away—this book might not fix it. But it might help you name it. And that could be enough.