PI LLO W-PROBLE MS.
T"pillow-problem is one of practically universal interests for he must be healthy and happy far beyond ordinary human experience who can say that he never remembers to• have laid down his head on his pillow with the dread of sleep- lessness before him. Most men at some time in their lives. have known what it is to be in bed in the dark and yet wide awake, and look upon the return of such a condition with horror; for, in truth, the inability to sleep coupled with the desire, is one of the most distressing sensations which mind and body are capable of enduring. Sleeplessness comes from many different causes, and thus the pillow-problem has a plentiful variety of aspects. First, there is the real disease of insomnia ; one of the most painful and one of the most in- curable and obscure of maladies. Of that we propose to say nothing, for it is a matter beyond the alleviation of mere palliatives and dodges. Sleeplessness caused by actual pain must, again, be left to the doctors. The sleeplessness pro- duced by neuralgia or toothache can only be attacked by removing the pain. The moment the pain is gone, sleep falls in an instant, and with the sweep of a heavy curtain released from its cords. If one has had two sleeplesei. nights from a bad tooth and then has the tooth taken out, sleep comes on the third night, not only unimplored, but unawares. The pillow-problem for ordinary men and women under ordinary circumstances is what we have to deal with. Speaking broadly, we want to consider what is the best way of getting to sleep at night when worry or excite- ment, or overwork or indigestion, or some such cause, has banished sleep. Unquestionably, one of the best ways is to drink a tumbler, or a couple of tumblers, of hot water in sips as one is undressing. The soothing effect is wonderful ; and if care is taken to let at least two hours elapse since the last meal, no possible harm can come of the treatment.. Another excellent device is to get up and take from forty to. sixty drops of sal.volatile in a wine-glass of water, with a good pinch of carbonate of soda added. That is a prescription which seldom fails. Many persons, however, either find these physical remedies of little or no avail, or else cannot be at the pains to use them. They argue that when they go to bed, they cannot tell whether they are going to sleep or not ; and since sleeplessness is the exception, they are not going to swill hot water on the chance. Others, again, declare that sleeplessness is sure to attack them when they have no soda and sal-volatile handy ; or that the bore of getting up and blundering about the room, striking matches, opening cup- boards, wrenching out stoppers, mixing doses and finally taking them, is worse than the disease. Such people are not they will tell you, but only upset for the moment. If they could distract their thoughts for a few minutes from this or that subject, they would, they feel, be asleep at once. What, 'then they want is some good " tip " for distracting their minds, and so getting rest.
To try to satisfy this demand for a mental anodyne, Mr. Dodgson—better known to the world as the author of "Alice in Wonderland "—has published with Messrs. Macmillan and Co. a little volume entitled " Pillow-Problems." The book, as he explains in the preface, is a collection of seventy-two problems, nearly all of which were solved while lying awake at night. The object of the publication is to bring comfort to those who are sleepless because they are " haunted by some worrying subject of thought which no effort of will is able to banish." As Mr. Dodgson says, it is useless to say : " I will not think of it any more ! I have gone through it all thoroughly. It can do no good whatever to go through it again. I will think of something else ;" for, two minutes -after the resolve is made, up pops the head of the mental Jack-in-the-box with a grin and a " Here we are again, old fellow !" Who does not know the process P Your head towhee the pillow ; and you begin at once to wonder what -could have induced you to sell out Corporation stock and to reinvest in Mexican railways. Well,' you say, what's done is done, and it is sheer madness to make myself ill by 'thinking of it now. That will only make me incapable of retrieving the blunder by earning more in my profession. Here goes, then, to think of something else.' You begin, accordingly, 'to wonder what you shall think about. One subject after another is dismissed. The Bill for marking foreign meat, or for stopping the adulteration of feeding-stuffs, is too dull ; the utter inability of the Navy to cope with the combined „fleets of Hungary, Belgium, and Switzerland, too exciting. The cheapest place for a holiday at first sight seems good, -but it suggests ways and means, and this suggests invest- ments. No, no ! for that way madness lies. Bimetallism ! No, that will not do, for Mexican railway dividends are paid in silver ; or if not, at any rate Mexican fares and freights are, and the currency is therefore little better than a short cut to the tabooed subject. Home-rule ! But the mind put to work on Home-rule in bed and in the dark, goes round and round without going in, like a screw that has come against a piece of stone or an iron bolt. Hang it ! what shall I think about P you say ; ' and in an instant up starts the horror, Only too happy to oblige.' I,' it says, ' alone am constant. I stick to you everlastingly ; ' and like a whirlwind on the dykes, thoughts on the folly of not sticking to trustee investments rush in upon you, and overwhelming all obstacles, take pos- session of your mind, riot and revel there, light their -constant lamps, and wave their purple wings. It is all no good. You cannot prevent yourself thinking •of Mexican rail- ways merely by saying to yourself, I will not.' It is utterly impossible, by a mere effort of volition, to prevent these thoughts on present discontents. " Witness," says Mr. Dodg- son in his "Alice in Wonderland" manner, the common trick played on a child of saying, "I'll give you a penny, if you'll stand in that corner for five minutes and not once think of strawberry jam. No human child ever yet won the tempting wager." But is it necessary, then, to own defeat, and to pro- -claim the final triumph of worry,—to hail the mental " old man of the sea ?" "Ave Omar Imperator non dormituri to salutant." Assuredly not, else indeed would the curate's missreading be true,—" And when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead men." Though you cannot will yourself not to think -of Mexican rails, and cannot easily find ordinary subjects as -substitutes, it is possible to select a topic of thought which will keep the mind occupied. The only way to clear your mind of Mexican rails is to fill it full of something else, and of something abstract in its nature, something which will not .start, say as microbes in butter, and by a process of evolution -end in a new chapter of "hints to small investors." Now, for this purpose, the more abstract the subject chosen the better. If you can take a simple problem in geometry, and hold your mind .clown on it till it becomes interesting, you can successfully banish the demon. The angles which make up a right-angle never put on the horrid shape of a board of directors recommend- ing the omission of a dividend for the past half-year. No doubt, for this purpose of abstracting the mind, and for getting it rapt into regions of pure thought, mathematics are the best possible resource. Geometry and algebra, in other words, afford the ideal pillow-problems. Unfortunately, however, not all minds will bite on such questions as " Find a general formula for two squares whose sum = 2," or on " In a given triangle to place a line parallel to the base such that the portions of sides inter- cepted between it and the base, shall be together equal to the base." There arc thousands of men who would far rather not know than know the general formula, and who would not, if they could, place the line parallel to the base of the triangle.
These are subjects on which they very much prefer to remain ignorant, subjects which produce in their minds a horror akin to that of those who find themselves somehow or other in company with a chart devoted to morbid anatomy, "the dimensions in the diagrams being multiplied 10.368 times.' Even homely problems such as, "A bag contains two counters, as to which nothing is known except that each is either black or white : ascertain their colours without taking them out of the bag," are, to most unmathematical minds, sources of un- rest rather than of quiet. They raise awful doubts in the plain man's mind as to whether somebody mightn't be able to find out by the Calculus that it was he who blackballed his wife's sister's second husband when he came up at the Euroclydon. What, then, is the resource of the man whose mind is not suited to triangles, square-roots, bags with black balls, A's who give B's two shillings and get back three farthings, and men who walk eight miles an hour the first day and seven the next, and so on, till they are overtaken by other men who walk at a uniform pace of three miles an hour, including lunch " ? Must they toss in agony beneath the silent stars ? Not a bit of it. If they will only exercise a little ingenuity, they may find plenty of safe abstractions. If they are fond of architecture, let them design a perfect gentleman's residence with pineries and hothouses connected therewith by a commo- dious and artistic iron structure in the nature of a conserva- tory or winter-garden; or lay out a flower-garden. If they are artistically inclined, they can devise a new scheme for hanging the pictures in the National Gallery, which shall include a room for the masterpieces, after the model of the salon carne in the Louvre. Sleep will come long before the fifty best pictures are selected. More practically minded men can suggest schemes for reorganising the Army and Navy, for making new lines of railway communication east and west in England, or for taxing ground-rents in an equitable and efficient manner. Every man has a certain number of abstract hobbies. He can utilise them, he will find, to play phantasias on when he wants to court sleep. He need not be afraid of getting too much interested ; the moment his mind bites, and he loses sight of Mexican railways, sleep will over- take him. The rearranged pictures of the National Gallery will grow dimmer and dimmer, and will at last disappear in mists of sleep.
It is a curious fact that though nothing is more detestable than the borderland between sleeping and waking at night, nothing is more delightful than that borderland in the early morning. Dr. Johnson feelingly said that the happiest moments in his life were those which he passed lying awake in bed in the morning. He must be a very wicked person who would deny the truth of this saying. It was Sir Walter Scott, if we remember rightly, who gave a name to these delicious moments. He called such happy wakefulness " simmering ; " and it was while simmering that the plots of his novels were spun. No one wants what the young lady called "tangents and things" then. The only pillow-problem of the morning is how to strike the best balance between the joy of lying on another ten minutes, and a breakfast which has got a little cold. And even this problem can be solved. " Don't bring up breakfast till I ring " is the magic spell which smooths the only crumpled roseleaf of the " slug-a-bed," as Herrick, who clearly had an evil conscience—le looks in his bust like Heliogabalus turned parson—called a lady who was not such a fool as to get up on May morning, but stuck to the sweet security of her own blankets. Seven to nine has no real pillow-problems, and is the only piece of unspoiled life left us by the mad pursuit of duty to which this generation has abandoned itself.
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