The Sleep Management Plan

Bourke's ( You Can Make Your Dreams Come True ) basic idea is a good one: people should manage their sleeping hours much as they manage the waking hours--for maximum benefit and minimum waste. To that end, sheok suggests that we can probably cut the span of our nightly sleep by 30 minutes to two hours by making gradual adjustments and employing motivational techniques. It's certainly true that a proper amount of sleep, combined with dietary changes and regular exercise, can increase one's energy level. But Bourke's ``plan'' is often impractical (who can guarantee that he'll be able to keep the same bedtime for weeks on end?) and sketchy (her idea of motivation is ``Just do it'' or ``I think I can, I think I can''). In the course of barely 100 pages, the author repeats herself (warm milk, a bromide, reappears like a recurrent dream), and her experts have surprisingly little of substance to say about sleep. Some suggestions are valuable, if obvious (``Eat enough, but not too much''), and the book may inspire readers to put into action dormant plans to stop wasting time. But the same could be said of a magazine story on the subject--which is what the author of this thin, overstretched volume might well have written instead. $40,000 ad/promo; author tour (Dec . )