Solitude, wanderlust, a thirst for love, for life, and for self- knowledge spin themselves into insomnia and drive Maria Diaz, a twenty-six year old Math teacher from Miami into a search for answers, which takes her into her own brain during sleep. It is a magic world where her id, her libido, her muses, and her conscience come alive and reveal her inner self: her agnosticism; her disdain for her overextended virginity; her disillusionment with her career and the curse and blessing of growing up with two cultures in the U.S. But the human brain takes back what it gives. All memory of the night's proceedings is confiscated upon awakening, except for minimal token wisps of dreams. Even so, she manages the Promethean task of bringing to light her dark world of sleep. How she steals the night's forbidden treasures and thus finds balance in her life is her story. The author, born Luis Eduardo Alban in Ecuador, S.A. in 1938, came to Savannah, Georgia in 1952, a city which has been home since then. He received his A.B. and PhD in Economics from the University of Georgia. His professional life has been entirely in academe, teaching Economics, Statistics and Quantitative methods. Since his retirement in 2000 he has traveled extensively in Europe and South America and has pursued his love for languages and literature, publishing poetry in regional literary periodicals and a compilation of short stories about words. This is his first novel. Married for 46 years to JoAnn Cool from Kansas, they now divide their year between Georgia and Kansas. They have two children.