Book excerpt: This book is part of an ongoing history of efforts to understand the nature of waking and sleeping states from a biological point of view. We believe the recent technological revolutions in anatomy and physiology make the present moment especially propitious for this effort. In planning this book we had the choices of producing an edited volume with invited chapter authors or of writing the book ourselves. Edited volumes offer the opportunity for expression of expertise in each chapter but, we felt, would not allow the development of our ideas on the potential and actual unity of the field and would not allow the expression of coherence that can be obtained only with one or two voices, but which may be quite difficult with a chorus assembled and performing together for the first time. (Unlike musical works, there is very little precedent for rehearsals and repeated performances for authors of edited volumes or even for the existence of conductors able to induce a single rhythm and vision of the composition. ) We thus decided on a monograph. The primary goal was to communicate the current realities and the future possibilities of unifying basic studies on anatomy and cellular physiology with investigations of the behavioral and physi ological events of waking and sleep. In keeping with this goal we cross-reference the basic cellular physiology in the latter chapters, and, in the last chapter, we take up possible links to relevant clinical phenomenology.