Poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible, imagining that the new, cutting-edge technologies - the telegraph, telephone, the electric light, and the railway - were perpetually encroaching upon the night and the mind to interrupt normal sleep cycles. This book explores the theories surrounding this history of modern insomnia, how the modern world is essentially 'Becoming Insomniac.' It investigates what makes the sleepless condition so special - involving strange paradoxes of attention...