Desperate circumstances forced Lunzie Mespil, Healer (a combination of doctor and psychiatrist) to abandon the starship on which she was a passenger. Since she made it to a lifeboat, Lunzie is not too worried; she will spend a month or two in cryogenic stasis awaiting inevitable rescue, and then proceed with her life. Only it's not a month or two. Lunzie waits for sixty-two years before she is finally picked up. How Lunzie deals with being reborn to a world she never made, a world that has grown strangely dark and dangerous during her long sleep, is the story of The Death of Sleep.