The art of natural sleep — Story, Setting & Ideas

Sleep has its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and Existence; sleep has its own world.

Consciousness may be suspended. But the cortical centres are frequently as active when we are asleep as when awake. The attention can be maintained with such unbroken steadiness as to awake some persons with the exactness of an alarm clock on the very minute, even though for purposes of deception the hands of the clock may have been set back without their knowledge. The motor centres can be counted on so confidently that they will drive the somnambulist with the accuracy of a trained chauffeur to his appointed destination. Sleep is, therefore, nothing more than a temporary suspension of a portion of the brain’s activity.

[2] Manaceïne, 62, 69, 70.

[3] Dr. J. Madison Taylor in the _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1905.

[4] Thomson’s _Brain and Personality_, 314.

THE NECESSITY OF SLEEP

But that suspension is an absolute necessity to health of mind and body. Men have been known to go for forty days without nourishment and retain unimpaired all the mental faculties. No man goes for even three days and nights without sleep except he pay a penalty in mental equipoise, and death itself is apt to bring his misery to an end, it is claimed, in five sleepless nights and days. Professors Patrick and Gilbert of the University of Iowa found, some years ago, that in certain cases there were after two nights of complete wakefulness hallucinations, loss of attention, inability to remember, and unmistakable evidences both of mental disorganisation and physical depression.[5] In Kipling’s story, tragically true to life, Hummil died after eighty-four hours of unrelieved insomnia, and the author’s closing words would seem to indicate that madness overtook him at the last: “In the staring eyes was written terror beyond expression of any pain.”

The occasional genius like Napoleon may perhaps get on habitually with four hours of sleep each night, and the mother watching by the sick-bed of her child may go for weeks in an emergency with but an hour or two of sleep at intervals, infrequent and irregular. But the sensible division made by Alfred the Great into eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, eight hours for play, will be as far as possible observed by the right-minded and far-seeing everywhere.

[5] _Psychological Review_, September, 1896.

INSOMNIA AND ITS CAUSES

Insomnia reduced to simplest terms is nothing but the inability to sleep. While the causes of insomnia may sometimes be exceedingly complex, ordinarily they are evident both to us and those we love the best. Anything, as we all learn by experience, which accelerates the activity of the mind and increases the congestion of the brain is likely to induce insomnia. Worry, fear, grief, prolonged mental effort, any sort of emotional excitement, social dissipation, the intemperate use of coffee, tea, or alcohol are among the most familiar causes of insomnia. Disturbances of digestion, neuralgic pains, arterial disease, eye-strain, and dental lesions are the hidden causes, oftener than we imagine, of protracted wakefulness.

Many of the more obstinate cases of insomnia are due, we know at last through Dr. Upson’s remarkable book,[6] to some dental lesion unsuspected because, as is not uncommon, it is unaccompanied by the ache habitually associated with all the ills to which the teeth are heirs. In my Emmanuel clinic I have had one case of insomnia which, in spite of all an efficient doctor could do for the body and the Emmanuel worker for the mind, persisted until I at last discovered that the sufferer was in immediate need of a dentist, whose threshold, through a morbid fear, he had not crossed in many years.

[6] _Insomnia and Nerve Strain_, 12.

For insomnia there is no specific known to medicine. While the good family doctor may correct digestive disturbances, banish for the time neuralgic pains, modify arterial disease, relieve with the oculist’s assistance eye-strain, and through the dentist remove the cause of dental lesions, sometimes insomnia persists long after the physical cause has disappeared. I have had in my clinic one case of chronic sleeplessness caused by a headache which appeared incurable though the cause of the headache and insomnia alike had vanished years before.

Drugs which induce sleep induce it merely for the time. Doctor Caillé in his large experience has found morphia invaluable for the inhibiting of pain or of severe dyspnœa, chloral and the bromides useful in cases of visceral neuralgia, codein and urethan in arteriosclerosis, and in pulmonary tuberculosis, where beer and porter failed to bring the longed-for sleep, dionin, trional, and hyoscin. But in ordinary cases of insomnia, where the cause is evidently more psychical than physical, he is inclined to turn rather to suggestion in one form or another.[7]