The Edge of Sleep TV Series Breakdown - How Does It Compare To The Podcast & The Book?

The Edge of Sleep is a 2024 tv series created by Jake Emanuel & Willie Block & originally released on Amazon Prime.

In this breakdown I'll be looking at how it compares & contrasts to both the original podcast & book adaptation whilst also giving my own observations & opinions on the show, pointing out anything I find noteworthy such as references to other media, errors, & so on, along the way as well.

Now, let's begin!

ONE

So a big fyi for you all, this show isn’t actually an adaptation of the podcast which came out in 2019, it is instead an adaptation of the novelisation of the podcast which came out in 2023 & the novelisation is different from the podcast in a variety of ways both major & minor.

So throughout this breakdown while I’ll primarily be focusing on how this show compares to the podcast I’ll also point out how it compares to the novelisation. Which leads me to my next point …

TWO

The character of Matteo.

In the podcast in terms of how serious he is to how goofy he is, he’s a lot more serious than how he is in the show. And even then when he’s being more goofy it’s more so in a patronising way.

Like when he, Dave & Linda are cutting open a dude’s head to check his brain, & Matteo says how he’s a capricorn & likes college football etc, he says this more in a way that he just isn’t taking what they’re doing seriously at all, rather than him joking around & playing it up for the camera.

And in terms of how serious book Matteo is compared to how goofy he is, book Matteo is a lot more goofy.

Book Matteo has a quirk where he messes up words, movie & tv show names & quotes from movies & tv shows. In the first chapter alone he says ‘spinks’ instead of ‘sphinx’, says ‘weekdays with Barney’ instead of ‘weekend at Bernie’s’ & says ‘My name is Enrique Montego. You sworded my dad. Prepare to be killed’ instead of ‘Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'

This quirk of his continues to pop up throughout the entire book & the only time I found it funny was when Matteo starts singing the Flintstones theme song but messes up the words & changes them to ‘Jetsons, meet the Jetsons, they’re the Montessori family.’

So for the show I think they found a good balance in making Matteo not too serious but also not too goofy.

THREE

In the podcast Matteo doesn’t join Dave in going to Randy’s party, & Dave only goes because whilst at Daxalabs, when Matteo’s out of the room, Dave gets a call from Katie which starts off fine but ends up with them arguing & she mentions going to Randy’s party & he can find her there if he wants to talk some more.

When Dave gets to Randy’s though, she’s already gone just like in the book & show, but unlike in the book & show the only person awake is Gus, who is a drug dealer & is the one who Dave speaks to.

There is no Connor character in the podcast, in fact amusingly Gus actually confuses Dave for a guy called Connor, who is the one from Huntington beach, not Gus.

FOUR

There’s no mention of Katie being a recovering drug addict in the podcast, and when she finally answers the phone when Dave calls her later on she even says Gus, that fucking drug dealer, gave her what he said was MDMA but she thinks might’ve instead been speed, explaining why she didn’t just go straight to sleep after getting home from the party.

I think I prefer how she’s not a recovering addict in the podcast because her having taken speed & then coming down from that helps explain more why she crashes so much sooner than Dave, Matteo & Linda.

FIVE

The only person Dave finds dead at Randy’s in the podcast is the host with the most, Randy himself, who’s dead on the sofa rather than in his bed.

And speaking of Randy’s bed in the show Alisha’s dead in bed with him, but in the book the woman’s name is instead Becka. 

Now, normally I wouldn’t point out a name change like that for such a minor character but considering how consistent the character names are across the podcast, book & show, it makes me wonder why her name was changed specifically.

SIX

When Dave in the podcast arrives at the hospital, with Randy’s body in his car, he actually finds the staff all standing outside, some smoking, some crying.

Linda, ignoring Dr Gordon’s orders, had made an announcement telling all the staff to evacuate the hospital, because just like Dave at Randy’s in the show, podcast Linda believed a gas leak might’ve been what was causing the deaths, that or a chemical agent.

And Dr. Gordon isn’t the one who just ups & leaves the hospital during the emergency in the podcast, it’s actually Linda & she doesn’t even say she needs to head to the police station to report what’s happening, instead just wants a lift from Dave into town because her bus didn’t show up.

So I actually prefer Linda’s characterisation in the book & show more here compared to the podcast, show Linda is more selfless, staying at the hospital during the emergency & putting her job as a nurse first instead of essentially quitting & wanting to head home like she does in the podcast.

SEVEN

The characters of the woman & her dad sat in the waiting room with Dave & Matteo don’t exist in the podcast, & in the book it’s actually Matteo who realises both the daughter & father have died.

When the father & daughter have fallen asleep he sneaks over to get his hands on the whiskey bottle to have a drink, he puts it back in the woman’s purse but then realises something’s off & after snapping in the guy’s face, clapping in front of the woman’s face, then moving her arm, he & Dave realise they’re dead.

I prefer how they discover the daughter & father have died in the show, with Dave being warned to wake them up by the Modafalyst cartoon.

Sidenote, Madafalyst is based on the real world drug Modafinil, & is called Modafinil in the podcast.

The advert, I’m British that’s what we call them, also reminds me of when Modafinil is first mentioned in the podcast by Linda & then an upbeat audio type advert plays for Modafinil with a jingle & everything. 

Though the old timey announcer that says the slogan afterwards “Stay awake, stay alert, stay alive.” when he says Modafinil it actually sounds more like he says Modaffodil, which I find weird.

Plus the voice of the Modafalyst cartoon character sounds a hell of a lot like the voice of the Moobles from the podcast.

I’ll talk more about the Moobles later on in the breakdown.

EIGHT

A minor change I don’t understand from the podcast to the book to the show is, in the podcast when Dave’s mother Tracy is reading an alphabet book with him when they get to B it stands for Banana, but then in the book the B stands for ball, specifically a baseball, but then for the show the B has gone back to standing for Banana.

No idea why it was changed to ball for the book & then back to banana for the show, & it’s not even really that big of a deal, just a minor thing I noticed that I just don’t get why it was changed at all in the first place.

NINE

In the elephant alphabet nightmare in the podcast, book & show Tracy turns into some form of elephant monster, & when I would listen to the podcast I just imagined her head turning into that of an elephant.

But I much prefer her transformation in the book & show, how she rips open her scalp & pulls away the skin to reveal less of an actual elephant but more like a mutated & grotesque elephant-human hybrid.

I’ll also point out that in the podcast this is actually a nightmare Dave had when he was a kid, after Dave’s dad John had read him the alphabet book before he went to sleep, …

& after Tracy helps Dave wake up from the nightmare her & John have a big argument over how Dave never being able to have one full night’s sleep since he was born has significantly negatively affected their lives.

Also, in the podcast, one there is no elephant hand puppet chest burster & he doesn’t see the dream people, & two it’s actually a flashback of him having this nightmare as he recalls it whilst he’s driving around with Linda, rather than having a nightmare of himself as a kid whilst he’s an adult in the same bed as Katie as we see in the book & show.

The elephant hand puppet chestburster was also a nice touch to just add a bit more horror to the nightmare in my opinion.

TEN

I prefer how Linda breaks down & screams in the book & show compared to how she screams in the podcast.

When she screams in the podcast it’s not long after her & Dave have driven away from the hospital, she still believes Brit is alive, & is screaming more so because she’s just had to deal with a whole lot of patients dying all at once & then getting into arguments with Dr. Gordon.

And even then she doesn’t scream until she’s asked Dave if she can because she really wants to & he says it’s okay, then she rolls down the window, sticks her head out & lets loose.

But I think they did it better in the show with how she’s characterised as more professional & selfless than in the podcast, this whole time despite all the dead patients & Dr. Gordon abandoning them she’s managed to keep her composure…

But after finding Brit dead & realising falling asleep will kill you her composure, her professionalism, her selflessness finally breaks & she just selfishly vents everything that she’s been bottling up all night, screaming her head off without asking for permission.

It more effectively shows just how tightly wound, how stressed, how on edge she was compared to podcast Linda & her exploding like she does I feel is much more impactful.

ELEVEN

Just gonna take this moment to say I appreciate how this show has moments of subtle humour to lighten the mood amidst the constant stress & drama of watching our main characters try to figure out what to do & how to stay awake.

Like the deadpan way Dave speaks to Matteo in the beginning, how Matteo has a bro fight with Connor, though I would’ve liked to hear him say the book line ‘Let’s go, you silly ass clown bitch.’

Dave adding on please when Linda tells Matteo to get the car & then realising they haven’t told Linda their names & so on & so on & so on throughout the show.

The humour in the podcast mainly comes from someone saying something that someone else finds funny but it wasn’t intended to be funny at all.

I’m particularly thinking of when Matteo tells Dave about a friend he had in Iraq who told him he was a guard at a top secret facility where they experimented on monkeys, & one of the monkeys ended up with muscles so big he described it as looking like John Cena, which Dave finds hilarious to think about.

TWELVE

I hope Dave at least let the doggo we see in the house he investigates out of their cage & then left the front door open so it could come & go as it pleases. 

This also makes me think of how I would always end up wondering ‘what about all the pets’ when coming up with 'last person on Earth' type stories.

Like, would the person have a heart & try to free as many pets as they could? What about the risks of potentially freeing violent dogs? Or you end up getting attached to the non-violent ones who follow you around & now you have to feed & look after dozens of dogs, maybe even cats as well?

Or would the person just head out into the middle of nowhere to escape all the haunting barking, yelping & crying of all the trapped, starving, dying animals?

Shit that got dark, let’s move on shall we? 

THIRTEEN

In the podcast after Dave & Linda have checked nearby houses to see if anyone’s still alive their next plan of action isn’t to somehow get a warning out to everyone like in the show but instead to head for the Centre for Disease Control in Los Angeles, & that’s because by this point they don’t actually know it’s falling asleep that kills you.

They only realise that going to sleep will kill you after they set off for LA, Linda swallows two blue pills called Zyophrine but which she refers to as 'elephant tranquilisers.'

This triggers Dave to remember the whale telling him to beware of the elephant & the elephant alphabet nightmare he had as a kid & he then forces Linda to throw up the sleeping pills.

So yeah, in the podcast it’s actually Linda who took pills to sleep, not Katie.

Then Linda calls Dr. Gordon, who’s still at the hospital, to go & check on Brit who’s taking a nap, but surprise surprise Brit’s dead. And only then does Linda come to the conclusion that if you fall asleep, you die.

I prefer how they do the whole them figuring out that falling asleep will kill you thing in the podcast compared to the show because in the show it kinda doesn’t make sense how it seemed even with the father & daughter & Brit falling asleep & dying at the end of episode one they just didn’t piece it together that if you fall asleep you die until later after checking the houses halfway through episode two.

I do also think Linda & Dave in the podcast should’ve been able to piece it together sooner but with show Linda specifically saying to Dave & Matteo at the end of episode one “She was sleeping. That’s when she died. She died in her sleep.” I just think the show characters would’ve figured it out sooner than the podcast characters at least.

And when it comes to the book characters, them finding all the people dead in their beds, or on couches, or on the floor after falling off a stool as Matteo finds one woman, it’s more so a confirmation of what they were assuming at the hospital, falling asleep will kill you.

And while show Matteo is in disbelief of that idea calling it crazy & impossible, book Matteo is more so in disbelief of the situation that they’re in, calling it insane.

So I’d even say the book’s version of them figuring out that falling asleep will kill you is better than the show’s version, but the superior version is still the podcast’s version of events in my opinion.

FOURTEEN

While Linda says that they should try & call everyone that they think might still be awake & tell them not to fall asleep, I would’ve thought there’d be at least some worry & despair about all their friends & family as well.

I mean Matteo in the podcast at least says that he needs to call his mum & sister to see if they’re alright but what about Dave’s parents? Is he not worried about them or are they both already deceased?

Linda in the book & show though I could get considering how later it’s revealed she’s living an entirely new life after failing to blow the whistle on Cynagen. But that’s not the case for podcast Linda so again I would’ve thought she’d be worried about her friends & family.

Plus no one even considers the idea of trying to get into contact with other countries, like it makes me wonder when this story is meant to be taking place.

In the podcast Matteo says he recognises Katie from Dave’s Instagram but is that the only social media there is in the Edge of Sleep universe?

But even if Facebook & Twitter don’t exist (hopefully Twitter soon actually won’t) why don’t they just check the rest of the internet to see what the rest of the world is saying about most of the United States going to sleep & not waking up.

I mean I get by the end of the podcast, book & show multiple days have passed so the vast majority of the Earth’s population will have ended up falling asleep & dying.

But not everyone on the entire planet was asleep between 4 & 5am PST on the 5th of July. Hell it would’ve been 1pm BST in my home country of the UK, I would’ve been wide awake. 

So wouldn’t the rest of the world have noticed & reported on something weird happening in the US? Sent people to investigate? Made their own radio announcement? Something?

FIFTEEN

Alright this is a big criticism I have for both the book & the show, slightly less so for the book but definitely more so for the show.

So Matteo’s car breaks down in both the book & the show, my question is, why waste so much time trying to fix it when you’re surrounded by houses with cars parked outside.

Just pick a house, smash your way in, & look for the keys in all the spots you’d most likely expect them to be kept in a house.

It takes so long for Matteo to fix his car that in that time him, Dave & Linda could’ve instead picked a house each with a car parked outside & broken in to look for keys, or Matteo could’ve kept working on his car whilst Dave & Linda looked, instead of Linda just standing around waiting for Matteo & Dave taking off on foot.

Now, the reason I say this a bit less of a criticism for the book is because book Matteo continuously makes it incredibly obvious he loves his car, so it makes sense he wouldn’t just straight up abandon it if he was convinced he could get it working again.

Which is a quirk not shared by show Matteo, which is why my criticism is more of a major one for the show.

SIXTEEN

The rest of the episode plays out pretty much exactly as how it happens in the book but completely unlike how events happen in the podcast that leads Dave, Linda, Matteo & Katie to end up at the hospital all together.

In the podcast there is no Matteo’s car breaking down, no Dave running to Katie’s to make sure she doesn’t fall asleep, & because Late Night Larry isn’t a character in the podcast there’s no Matteo & Linda heading to the radio station.

What is in the podcast is a major character & a major series of events that is completely cut from the book & the show, which I can understand why due to its subject matter, but still leaves me disappointed that we didn’t get to see it.

After Linda’s thrown up her sleeping pills, called Dr. Gordon & found out Brit has died in her sleep, her & Dave abandon their plan to drive to the CDC & instead head back to the hospital.

Dave then calls Matteo who’s at home playing I assume Red Dead Redemption 2 telling him to join them at the hospital.

So Matteo’s finally with Dave & Linda & it’s at this point they do the whole cutting a guys skull open to try & find something out about how he died.

It’s only after this that Katie finally calls Dave back, not to tell him to stop calling & to give her space but to explain that she must’ve accidentally taken speed instead of MDMA at Randy’s party & that she’s confused as to why the town seems so empty.

She then spots a white van with blacked out windows & flags it down, Dave warns her to run but she gets kidnapped by the van driver. Now, how did Dave know to warn her, you might be asking? Well, whilst Dave & Matteo were last on shift at Daxalabs, a sketchy white van showed up in the car park. 

Dave & Matteo went to tell them to leave, Matteo got mad at the driver when he lied about being a veteran & they reported the van after they heard a woman making noises from within but the driver wouldn’t let them see who it was & sped off.

And as the van drove off Dave noticed on the back of the van the words ‘Same shit different party’ & the animals that represent the US political parties, a donkey & an elephant.

Back to the present, after kidnapping Katie, the driver heads for the hospital (he asked her where she was heading before Dave warned her to run so that’s why he knows to go there) & using an AK-47 he “acquired” from a gun store window the driver attacks Dave, Linda & Matteo.

Linda & Matteo escape to safety but Dave ends up with a gunshot wound & is captured by the driver, also known as The Trespasser as we never learn his real name. What happens between the Trespasser & Dave in the hospital I’ll get into more later on in the breakdown.

Anyways, Linda & Matteo having escaped the hospital go to the Trespasser’s van, break in & save Katie.

Unfortunately though they’re too late to save Maddie, the kidnapped woman Dave & Matteo heard making noises in the back of the van when the Trespasser showed up at Daxalabs, as she’d fallen asleep & died.

So I think one of the reasons the character of Ruth has been added into the book & show, she doesn’t exist in the podcast, is because Katie has joined the group much sooner & it gives her somewhere else to be while the story follows more in line with the podcast with only Dave, Matteo & Linda being present while they perform the autopsy.

The other reason why the character of Ruth has been included I’ll go into more when I talk about what happens between the Trespasser & a captured Dave.

SEVENTEEN

Circling back to the start of episode three we see the event which caused Katie to leave Dave, that she discovered him having sleep walked to the bathroom, smashed the mirror & used a shard of glass to carve a triangle into his chest.

This happens slightly differently in the book as Katie is woken up by the sound of crying & finds Dave standing in the bathroom, staring into the mirror sobbing but with no expression on his face.

Despite him having warned her to not touch him if she ever found him like this & to just leave him alone to let it run its course, she can’t help but touch his back, but after twenty minutes go by & he hasn’t changed she heads back to bed.

Only for Dave to then scream, smash his fist into the mirror, grab a shard & carve a triangle into his chest right in front of her, smiling as he does so. And after he’s finished he doesn’t ask Katie what’s wrong like he does in the show, instead he says "See? Mom? Do you see? Now I’m safe from it. I’m finally safe.”

A much creepier thing for him to say in my opinion & makes me wonder why he would say something like that knowing what we know of how the triangle is connected to the force that’s giving Dave his nightmares & killing people in their sleep.

Also, this does not happen in the podcast, this is not the reason why Katie left David. All the way back at the beginning as Dave is sitting alone at Daxalabs since Matteo’s gone to get them some drinks & snacks, Katie calls Dave & they have a conversation.

During that phone call Katie tells Dave she left because she didn’t feel safe, that she slept with a knife under her pillow. Dave tells her he’d never hurt her but she just responds with “I know that’s what you believe.”

Dave tries to get her to tell him if he did in fact hurt her but her ride to Randy’s shows up & she hangs up.

At Randy’s, Gus says Dave’s got some balls showing up because Randy had talked with some messed up girl with her arm in a sling & after that kept saying that if Dave showed up he was going to beat the shit out of him.

And then when they finally reunite at the hospital Dave notices the cast on her arm & when he asks her about it she says it’s just a minor fracture & some torn ligaments but she doesn’t really blame him for hurting her because he can’t control what he does in his sleep.

I prefer how the cause of the breakup was done in the book & show compared to the podcast because it adds an extra layer to the mystery around the whole dying in your sleep thing & makes you wonder just how much Dave is connected to it all.

EIGHTEEN

And speaking of something that isn’t in the podcast at all, the character of Dr. Castaneda & his Dream Chamber.

The only doctor in the podcast Dave’s parents, yes Dave’s father is actually a character in the podcast, I’ll talk about him more in a moment, is a Doctor Weiss.

Dave’s dad John ends up getting quite angry with Dr Weiss when he starts asking questions like when John & Tracy are having marital frustrations are these frustrations taken out on Dave & he explains the reason he’s asking these sorts of questions is because he believes Dave is suffering from PTSD which when it shows up in children is usually caused by physical or sexual abuse.

Later Weiss calls Tracy & asks if she’s open to treating Dave with untraditional therapies. Tracy then explains to John that what Weiss is suggesting is called sensory processing therapy & will involve her & Dave living somewhere isolated, just her & David, for 18 months with no visitors allowed in the first six months.

John is understandably not on board at first, not wanting to be away from his son for so long, not wanting his son to be away from his friends, not trusting something that isn’t FDA approved with no research or data to back it up.

But Tracy eventually convinces him to go through with it by pointing out that if Dave continues to keep having these nightmares every single night, he’s going to grow up not to be the next Einstein or Bill Gates, but potentially a murderer.

And it’s a good thing she did manage to convince him because the experiment works, Dave stops having nightmares so long as he avoids any violent media & he starts living a pretty normal life, going to highschool, having friends, going to parties & being obsessed with girls.

One such girl being Jane who even invites him over to her house but then she suggests they watch a horror movie called Moobles…

Once again, I’ll go into more depth about the Moobles later on in the breakdown.

I prefer how they handle treating Dave’s condition when he’s a child in the podcast because it shows how much love Dave’s parents have for their son & the lengths they’d go just to give Dave a chance at living a normal life & it actually does work, for a time.

Plus Dave’s dad John is an actual character & he seems like a good guy, stressed as fuck from having to deal with Dave’s condition but his heart is in the right place.

Not like what’s suggested in the book though, when Tracy tells the doctor how Dave has never slept through an entire night ever, he says she must be exhausted & she responds “My husband sleeps fine.” And tries to hide a bitter laugh.

So yeah with the word husband being in italics & her bitter laugh, it sounds like in the book at least Tracy & John’s marriage isn’t doing so well when compared to in the podcast.

NINETEEN

Speaking about Dr Castenada more specifically now, if you recognise him from somewhere but just can’t quite place it due to his goofy hair, if you’re a Saw fan then I suggest rewatching Saw 5.

Anyway, as I said before he’s a character exclusive to the book & the show but at least in the book he’s less of an arsehole.

Like when book Tracy says essentially the same thing as show Tracy that they don’t know for sure if doing this will make the bad things go away, book Castaneda doesn’t then chime in promising that it definitely will make the bad things go away.

Book Castenada also doesn’t go into an emotional monologue about how he’s had to live a painful & lonely life to be able to make the Dream Chamber a reality, which means there’s also no hints of Castenada having some sort of connection to the Dream People or the whales like there is in the show.

When Castenada is talking about how a lot of relationships that came into his life no longer exist we get a shot of a Dream Person & also a dead whale amongst gravestones. 

So what, was Castenada once a Dream Person but gave it up, or, like Dave, was meant to join the Dream People but turned away from that role? And then what about the dead whale, how does that connect to Castenada & what does it signify considering what we learn about them later on?

TWENTY

We’ve already had dialogue in the book & the show taken directly from the podcast, but Linda saying "Hey! Do you see any other doctors here? No? Well, shit, I guess that leaves us." is actually a line taken directly from the podcast but that was rewritten for the book.

And it sounds to me like Linda actress Eve Harlow listened to the podcast before filming, heard how Linda voice actress Cara Santana said the line & then tried not to say it in the exact same way.

TWENTY-ONE

I love how Dave says right in front of Katie that he kinda likes Linda, like consider how your sorta-girlfriend might interpret that dude.

At least in the podcast we only find out he likes Linda in his internal monologue after she’s suggested to him that he should consider dating & marrying a nurse because they deal with such heavy shit everyday that they don’t stress about the small stuff in a relationship.

TWENTY-TWO

I find it funny Matteo records the autopsy in portrait in the show when Dave says to him in the book “Landscape, you moron.”

And I also find it funny none of these guys in the show are wearing a mask as they do the autopsy yet Matteo in the book says “I’m glad we’re masked.”

TWENTY-THREE

Duane Bradley is all over the place when you compare his podcast, book & show incarnations.

Duane in the podcast is 16 years old & was checked in for third degree burns, in the book he’s 53 & was checked in for a fractured rib & in the show he’s 37 with a fractured rib, so literally the only constant between the three is his name.

And I also get ageing him up for the show because having Linda cut open the skull of a sixteen year old would be a bit much.

TWENTY-FOUR

There’s no mention of Linda working for Cynagen before she became a nurse in the podcast but she does still say she knows it’s not the government that’s causing people to die in their sleep because they only mess around with things like smallpox, influenza & SARS.

Maybe Linda was made part of a shady organisation in the book & show to add weight behind her saying the dying in your sleep stuff isn’t the government’s doing.

And possibly to create an air of mystery around Linda, at least in the book, because she says after she tried to blow the whistle she actually had to change her name.

Makes me wonder what her real name actually is then?

TWENTY-FIVE

Since in the podcast Dave never carved a triangle into his chest in his sleep he doesn’t have any more of a reaction to seeing a triangle burned into Duane’s brain compared to Linda & Matteo.

And because this is also way before the Trespasser has arrived at the hospital with Katie chained up in the back of his van she obviously doesn’t track him down to find out if he’s okay.

Which she does though immediately in the book, she interrupts Linda & Matteo arguing about Cynagen demanding to know where Dave is & she finds him up on the roof of the hospital.

And when she does find him she essentially forces him to finally open up to her by climbing up onto the roof’s railing, threatening to go right over if he gets close to her, & that’s when he tells her about killing Dr Castaneda as a child & being institutionalised for two years.

TWENTY-SIX

So Linda, Dave, Matteo & Katie perform the same MRI experiment in the podcast like they do in the book & show, but since Ruth isn’t a character in the podcast you might be wondering, who do they perform the test on?

Well they perform it on none other than the Trespasser. And Dave is the only one to stand up for the guy, definitely not Katie considering you know how the psycho, as she calls him, kidnapped her & chained her up in the back of his van & all that.

And Dave is only really defending the piece of shit, as Matteo calls him, because if they are the last people alive & they all do eventually end up falling asleep & dying he doesn’t want one of humanity’s last acts to be performing Nazi-esque human experiments.

They try to convince Dave to go through with it by showing him the large amount of driver’s licences they found in the guys van, all of them women’s, all of them his victims that he got away with murdering by making their deaths look like self-inflicted overdoses.

 When Dave says he still won’t do it because he won’t make himself judge, jury & executioner the group votes on it, three to one against Dave.

So Dave & Matteo strap the Trespasser down in the MRI machine, wait for him to fall asleep & find out, just like Ruth in the book & show, he died three minutes after falling asleep in a dream.

TWENTY-SEVEN

So if it’s the dreaming that kills you & not the falling asleep, all these guys had to do was find themselves a stockpile of Hypnocil & they would’ve been golden!

TWENTY-EIGHT

This is it guys, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, we are finally going to talk about the Moobles.

When Late Night Larry says over the radio in Dave’s dream that "Someone could kidnap you, tie you to a table, & try to cut your balls off." That is exactly what the Trespasser tried to do to Dave in the podcast after he arrived at the hospital with Katie in the back of his van, attacked the group & essentially took Dave hostage.

And rather than opening up & recounting a traumatic part of his teens to Katie like in the book & show, Dave does it to try & keep the Trespasser from hurting him.

And the tale goes thusly:

Dave, now living life as a regular highschooler, after the sensory processing/deprivation therapy he went through as a child worked, is invited over to his crush’s, Jane’s, house.

Unfortunately when he gets there she suggests they watch a horror movie, the Moobles, & Dave wanting to be tough & manly in front of his crush, agrees to watch the movie.

To describe the Moobles movie, it sounds like essentially a combination of the movies, Critters, Gremlins, The Stuff & Aliens.

The Moobles, little blue alien creatures, crash-land on a farm on Earth, similar to Critters, they terrorise a town, similar to Gremlins, the Moobles, which can remain perfectly motionless, are planned to be sold to the general public, similar to The Stuff, & in the end the Moobles queen & all her eggs are destroyed with a flamethrower & C4, similar to Aliens.

The night ends well for Dave, during the movie he managed to slip his arm around Jane who then snuggled up to him, & after the movie finished the two lovebirds made out.

But when Dave arrived back home & went to sleep, that’s when it all went wrong.

He had a nightmare that the Moobles had invaded his house, killed his parents, & then one by one entered his body via his mouth & you know, his other main hole.

They then taunted him by saying that they could now control him & goaded him into grabbing a kitchen knife to try to cut them out of himself.

Unfortunately, that’s not just what nightmare Dave tried to do, it’s also what irl Dave tried to do, stabbing himself multiple times all across his torso with a kitchen knife.

Luckily Dave’s dad heard Dave was doing something, went to check on him then called an ambulance after finding his son covered in self inflicted stab wounds.

So yeah Dave in the podcast also has self inflicted scars on his body, it’s just random stab wounds though instead of a triangle.

Anyways, after that Dave spent six weeks recovering from his wounds, six months in a psychiatric ward & then had to do two years of therapy & homeschooling.

And that’s the story of how Dave got his scars. And while the Trespasser decides to keep Dave alive after hearing it, wanting some male company for once, he says he’s a jealous guy & he can’t trust Dave enough to not want his pickle tickled when they’re with whatever girls they’re with, like Katie, when they’re hanging out down at the coast.

So he starts getting Dave ready to get his nuts chopped off but luckily Dave telling the Trespasser his Moobles story gave Matteo & Linda enough time to come up with a plan to rescue him. 

Linda turns off the hospital’s lights so Matteo could sneak in, & then turns them back on to blind the Trespasser which allows Matteo to attack & subdue him.

TWENTY-NINE

When Dave is handed a glass of water by his mum & dad in the podcast he doesn’t see an eye with a triangle in its pupil in it, instead he sees inside the glass an ocean full of people drowning, he sees death.

In the book he doesn’t see anything in the water his mother tries to make him drink, instead after the old man has made his mum get back in the car he hands Dave a canteen of water. 

Dave drinks from the canteen then has a vision of what would’ve happened to him if he’d drunk what his mum had tried to make him drink, he’d have died, obviously.

The old man then pours out the water from his canteen & looking into the puddle Dave sees an ocean but instead of seeing it full of drowning people he instead sees the whale & the old man tells Dave to follow the whale to him, to Aristera.

THIRTY

From what I can find out from my research the only Aristera I can find that’s south of Greece, which is where the island is said to be in the book, is an island called Spetsopoula that historically used to be called Aristera.

Bought by a man called Stavros Niarchos in 1962 it’s still owned by his descendants but the population of the island, at least in 2011, was zero, though it does get visitors.

In the podcast, rather than flying across the North Atlantic Ocean to head to Greece, they instead fly across the North Pacific Ocean & into the South to reach the capital city of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, or just Moresby as they call it in the podcast.

Fun fact as well, during my research of finding out if Aristera & Moresby were actually real world places, I discovered that Santa Mira isn’t a real world town, in California or otherwise.

It’s a fictional location that’s been used in a variety of books, movies & tv shows, & one of those movies in particular caught my eye, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Compared to the original 1955 book, just called The Body Snatchers, which is set in Mill Valley, California, & the 1978 movie adaptation starring Donald Sutherland, the adaptation I am most familiar with, which is set in San Francisco, California, a completely fictional Californian town was made up to be the setting for the 1958 movie adaption, Santa Mira.

And it makes sense for the writers of the Edge of the Sleep to reference Invasion of the Body Snatchers by having it set in the same fictional town.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers when people fall asleep a nearby pod will start creating a duplicate of that person lacking in humanity while the original just turns to dust. So the main characters try to stay awake & escape from all the pod people. Sound familiar?

The staying awake should obviously, & while duplicates aren’t being made the people who had fallen asleep waking back up possessed by dream demons, to use a phrase from Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, are kinda similar to the pod people, because you know they’ve had their bodies snatched.

Especially in regards to the dream demon possessed people in the podcast version which I’ll go more into later on in the breakdown.

THIRTY-ONE

Okay, funny story time. The day I binge watched all of the Edge of Sleep show, I went out for a meal with friends afterwards & talked to them about the show. And the best way that I could describe whatever is killing people in their dreams is by comparing it to like a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror type force.

Fast forward a few days & I finally get around to reading through the Edge of Sleep book, which actually didn’t take me as long as I thought it would because Dave, Linda, Matteo & Katie’s story only makes up half of the book, the other half follows other characters in that world so I skipped those chapters.

And wouldn’t you know it when Dave wakes up & is telling the group they need to go to Aristera & explaining about the elephant monster & the Dream People, book Linda literally says “It’s like Lovecraft” & says how she had an uncle who was into cosmic horror.

No lie, I literally laughed out loud when I read that thinking about my conversation with my friends & how I described it the exact same way.

THIRTY-TWO

So while Katie falls asleep & dies around this point in both the podcast & the book & show, in the podcast it happens quite differently.

I’m gonna have to be a little vague in some parts of my recounting of why she dies in the podcast because I want to cover parts of it more in depth in a later point in this breakdown but I’ll do my best to not sound confusing.

Podcast Katie falls asleep & dies before even getting on the plane, she realises she isn’t going to be able to stay awake the entire flight & that if she fell asleep on the plane she’d be a danger to the rest of the group.

So when Dave isn’t paying attention to her for a moment, she locks herself in the van they used to get to the airport & Dave tries to break his way in but can’t. She rolls the window down a little to reassure him that it isn’t his fault & he should just get on the plane.

Then she laid back, fell asleep & died. RIP Katie.

So Katie’s body never being on the plane & reaching the island means in the podcast there’s no description of her dream demon possessed body walking out of the ocean with triangles in her eyes.

THIRTY-THREE

Now let’s talk about one of the most major & important changes made for the book & show compared to the podcast.

In the podcast, when the plane crashes into the ocean, Matteo fucking dies.

No joke, Linda & Dave make it out of the plane & onto the island but there’s no sign of Matteo, at all.

And it just makes me wonder, a second season of the podcast has been written but yet to be made, how different is it going to be compared to if the book got a sequel or the show got a second season since it won’t have Matteo alive, & continuing on from my previous point, no Katie walking out of the ocean with triangles in her eyes?

Would they retcon it so that Matteo did actually survive but Dave & Linda just didn’t realise he had? Or will he be the one to come walking out of the ocean with triangles in his eyes? And play the role a dream demon possessed Katie would in a book sequel or second season of the show?

We’ll just have to wait & see.

THIRTY-FOUR

Just like in the show in the book the group suffers a joint hallucination of being at Katie’s funeral but in the book it’s revealed what form the dream demons take for Linda & Matteo.

For Matteo his demon takes the form of a heavily injured boy, missing limbs & half his head, a victim of a bomb Matteo remotely dropped on a house believed to be empty.

And for Linda she sees Ruth, accusing Linda of taking advantage of her & convincing her to die so that Linda could benefit from her death.

This makes me wonder what Katie’s demon would’ve been & I think she might’ve either seen herself back when she was an addict, or maybe Dave when she found him having carved the triangle into his chest because seeing that almost made her relapse.

What do you guys think Katie’s demon might’ve been? Let me know your ideas in the comments.

THIRTY-FIVE

Speaking of major changes from the podcast to the book & the show, who the old man is that Dave keeps dreaming about & what the whales actually are has been drastically altered.

While the old man, Safet, in the book & show is part of an order of people who arrived on Aristera & then met the wales, the old man in the podcast, Robbie, comes from a tribe of people that lives in the jungles of Papua New Guinea called the Morandi.

The Morandi had developed the ability to control their dreams & become dream warriors & it is in fact they who are the wales, & Robbie is the wale that Dave kept seeing & speaking with.

Throughout the podcast we switch from following Dave to seeing what Robbie is doing:

Dreaming of a beast with many faces, that howled like a monkey, hissed like a snake & laughed like a woman chasing him. Knowing that he could not outrun it but would have to fight it.

Encountering a newborn lamb being eaten by crabs, an ill omen of creatures from two worlds that should never have met.

Dreaming of himself as a whale, descending a deep trench & visiting the god of dreams Tulandian, a giant made of coral guarding the door between their world & what lies beyond.

Warning Robbie that what is pounding on the other side of the door will eventually break through so Robbie must return to his ancestral home, & call to whoever can hear him in their dreams to join him in the jungle.

And of course aiding Dave in facing the elephant monsters in his dreams, just like in the show & book.

When Dave & Linda are found by Robbie & his son Felix after the plane crash, Dave falls asleep in their over hour long drive they must take to reach the Morandi.

In the nightmare Dave is trapped in a dark pit for what felt like a week. Unable to escape either by getting out of the pit or ending his own life, he eventually forgets everything, even his own name.

But then out of nowhere a door appears & Katie steps through, trying to gain his trust by helping him remember who she & he is; she then tries to convince him to walk through the doorway.

But remembering the wale’s, Robbie’s, warning of "Beware of the Elephant" he realises it isn’t the real Katie, the pit begins to fill with water but then he finds himself standing at the bottom of the ocean looking up at a dozen wales, a dozen Morandi dream warriors, swimming above him, who help him reach the surface & wake up.

Again just like with Matteo dying & Katie not being on the island it makes me wonder just how different the next instalment of the podcast will be compared to the book & the show since the wales aren’t a cosmic force similar to the dream demons but instead just people who can control their dreams & use that power to fight against the dream demons.

THIRTY-SIX

Another curious thing that was left out of the book & show is that whilst Dave was having his nightmare of being trapped in the pit, Linda checked his vital signs & discovered that at some point, the stab wound scars he had on his chest had mysteriously disappeared.

No idea how that works or what it could possibly mean for the podcast story but it makes me wonder if book & show Dave will at some point discover his triangle shaped scar has mysteriously disappeared.

THIRTY-SEVEN

While there is no epilogue of all the people who had fallen asleep waking back up with red triangles for pupils in the podcast, there is a point where those who had fallen asleep do quote come back to life unquote, & it happens when the group have decided to go along with Dave’s plan to fly to Moresby.

Whilst packing supplies they notice a bunch of people standing out in the hospital’s car park, & inside the hospital they come across a naked old woman who’d stabbed herself a bunch all over her body.

She somehow knows Dave’s name & screams that she wants to reopen his scars & let the Moobles back in. She doesn’t get the chance to try though as Linda shoots her & she shoots other dream demon possessed people out in the car park as they try to stop the group from getting away in their van.

It turns out as well that these people could somehow see the group & did all of this whilst having their eyes closed, they were sleepwalking.

I also find it funny that when Dave says he thinks they were sleepwalking Matteo says: ‘When you sleepwalk, do you jump on a car and try to smash the windshield with your fucking fist? I didn’t know that sleepwalking had the same effects as PCP!’

Considering he’s asking Dave this, Dave, you know the guy who sleepwalked & stabbed himself a bunch of times, I think his answer would be ‘Pretty much, yeah.’

This is also the reason why podcast Katie, realising she wasn’t going to be able to stay awake for the whole flight, locked herself in the van so that she couldn’t be stopped from falling asleep.

Because she was worried that she would become dream demon possessed & start sleepwalking as well, & she didn’t want that to happen as they were mid-flight.

And when she did start sleepwalking she got out of the van & started taunting Dave saying that Katie along with his parents were with them, the dream demons, now.

Linda doesn’t shoot Katie despite cocking her gun & her & Dave join Matteo on the plane & they fly off, leaving Katie sleepwalking on the Santa Mira airport runway.

I actually prefer how Katie goes out in the podcast, a selfless act of sacrifice to make sure she didn’t put Dave, Linda & Matteo in any danger on the flight if she did actually start sleepwalking.

But I get why the reveal of all the people who had fallen asleep waking back up possessed by dream demons was used by the book & the show because goddamn if it ain’t a good cliffhanger.

MOST DISLIKED PART OF THE SHOW

To round all this off, my most disliked part of the show goes to the exclusion of the Trespasser & the Moobles storyline.

I can get why the Trespasser would be removed because including his character would mean the show having to deal with some pretty intense subject matters.

And they might not have been able to include the Moobles without them looking cheap or goofy but still it would’ve been neat to see if they had been able to somehow pull it off.

MOST LIKED PART OF THE SHOW

And my most liked part of the show goes to two things:

The first is having Matteo actually survive the plane crash & make it to the island, he’s a great character in the podcast & the show, less so in the book with his stupid quirks.

And while it’s a shame there won’t be more of him in the podcast unless they retcon his death or have him return as a sleepwalker, it’s awesome we get to see more of him in the show if it gets a season two.

And if the book gets a sequel hopefully they make him less annoying & more bad ass again.

And the second, because I don’t want my most liked part to just be how the show is better than the podcast, is how great the effects are, the whale didn’t look cheesy, the adverts & animations were well done & the elephant monster prosthetics were really well done, super creepy & gross.