One of the books I got last week at the library book sale was Spirituality and the Desert Experience, by Charles Cummings, OCSO (1978, Dimension Books, Denville, NJ). This exploration of spiritual deserts by a Trappist monk (he died in 2020) is very readable and possesses one of those qualities that I so enjoy in a book: the need to set the book down frequently and ruminate on what I’ve just read. In chapter two (pp. 42-44), Father Cummings describes a sleep study profiled in National Geographic magazine from March of 1975 (Vol.147, number 3) which was conducted by a French scientist named Michel Siffre. Father Cummings tells us: [Siffre]…