AND SLEEP for viola and piano is an adaption of And sleep overcame him as it does all men originally written for viola & accordion. It is inspired by a passage from the Mesopotamian epic‐poem Gilgamesh, in which the two protagonists Gilgamesh & Enkidu, set out to kill a monster that lives in the cedar forest. On their way there, they run each day hundreds of miles, they stop and rest, and every time they stop, they sleep and they dream. This same cycle of running and resting, is repeated word for word 5 times in the passage, the only change being the content of their dreams and the omens that the two characters try to interpret from them every morning. The passage ends when they finally reach their destination and stand at the edge of the forest, both men torn between the danger implied from the omens and their conviction on this self‐imposed heroic quest. The music comes out of the contrast between these two psychological states: The running, which can be interpreted as directional and wakeful, and the dreaming ‐ subconscious and symbolic. In the poem, every time they stop and rest, after the proper rituals have been made, the poet writes about Gilgamesh, the larger than life‐hero: “And sleep overcame him as it does all men.”