If your favorite holiday is Halloween — I like you.
Because you live between worlds.
Half in daylight, half in shadow.
Still curious about what’s on the other side.
Halloween was the first American holiday I ever loved.
The Fourth of July smelled like burnt meat and panic.
Thanksgiving was about food I couldn’t identify and sports I couldn’t care less about.
But Halloween was honest.
Because death is universal — and Halloween is the only holiday brave enough to celebrate it.
I even met my husband on that first American Halloween — 1993.
I was a witch.
He was a boy.
It’s still the case.
So to me it's personal. And that's why reading The Halloween Tree felt like coming home.
This book is the perfect reminder that the border between life and death is not a wall.
It’s a doorway.
And if you learn to look through it without flinching — you might just sleep better, love deeper, and live with more focus than ever before.
Because sleep and death — they’re cousins.
Both require surrender.
Both demand trust.
You can’t fake rest any more than you can fake dying.
You have to let go.
And no one captured the soul of this night better than Ray Bradbury.
Does he even have a single story that isn’t about death?
Every line he ever wrote vibrates with that same obsession: how to live beautifully while knowing you’ll die.
That’s the medicine of The Halloween Tree.
The book begins, as all great tales do, with a group of boys running through the October dark.
Eight of them.
Masks, capes, laughter, flashlights cutting through fog.
They’re on their way to meet their friend Pipkin — the golden boy, the ringleader.
Only tonight, Pipkin looks pale.
Sick.
Not quite there.
He tells them to go ahead — to the big house at the edge of town.
And that house… is pure Bradbury.
A haunted mansion humming with mystery, and beside it — the tree.
An enormous oak, its branches hung with glowing pumpkins, each one carved with a different face.
The Halloween Tree.
At the door appears the tall, skeletal figure of Mr. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud — part magician, part teacher, part undertaker.
He tells the boys: not treat, but trick.
And the trick is time.
When Pipkin is swept away into the past, Moundshroud takes the boys after him — flying like a kite’s tail through centuries of Halloween:
Ancient Egypt, where death meant preservation.
Rome and Greece, where it meant transformation.
The Celtic fields of Samhain, where the dead walked among the living.
The shadowed cathedrals of Europe, where death hid behind stained glass.
And finally, the bright, tender colors of Bradbury’s favorite country - Mexico and its Día de los Muertos, where death became reunion.
It’s a history lesson disguised as adventure — or maybe the other way around.
Bradbury does what only he can: he makes the fear of death feel like a story about being alive.
At the end, one of the boys must die — unless the others give up one year of their own lives to save him.
They agree instantly.
But Moundshroud warns them — a year at the end of your life may not seem like much now, but someday it will.
That’s the real trick of The Halloween Tree.
It’s about the bargain we make with time itself.
How every night’s sleep is a little rehearsal for death — and every morning, a resurrection.
That’s where it connects to what I do.
Unidelics is all about sleep, energy, focus, and clarity — but underneath those marketing-friendly words hides the same truth Bradbury carved into every pumpkin:
life only glows when you remember it’s temporary.
Sleep is the nightly rehearsal for that.
Every time you fall asleep, you die a little.
Every time you wake up, you’re resurrected — hopefully in a better mood.
The only difference is that most people now suck at both.
They don’t sleep.
They don’t wake.
They scroll.
They pace.
They live in a permanent Halloween state — half-dead, half-awake, terrified of missing out on something that doesn’t even exist.
And yet—sleep is the original magic.
It’s how the body sorts memories, cleans the brain, files emotions, detoxes fear, rehearses dying, and practices coming back to life.
Bradbury would have loved that: the nightly crossing between the underworld and the morning light.
So if you’re tired of haunting your own house, come join us.
Sleep Gym starts November 3rd.
We’ll train your body to do what it’s been trying to do since the dawn of time: rest, reset, and resurrect.
It’s a beautiful practice — somewhere between science, ritual, and rebellion.
Because the only thing scarier than death… is not getting eight hours.
And that’s what The Halloween Tree is really about, isn’t it?
The way we chase life by flirting with death.
The way children run through darkness just to remember they’re alive.
The book reads like a dream, runs with the energy of a nine-year-old boy, and burns with the clarity of someone who knows he’s alive.
So this week — read it.
Read it to your kids, or for the kid that’s still somewhere inside you.
Then turn off the lights, step outside, and look up.
The moon might just be one of Moundshroud’s pumpkins — swinging in the dark, whispering:
