A CURE FOR SLEEPLESSNESS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The terrible evil of insomnia has so many different sources, that the utmost we can hope from any single artifice is to afford relief from it under one special form. I venture
to think I have hit upon a plan which thus remedies a very common (not an aggravated) kind of sleeplessness ; and, with your permission, will endeavour to make your readers who may be fellow-sufferers sharers in my little discovery.
It is now, I believe, generally accepted that our conscious, daylight, thinking processes are carried on in the sinister half of our brains,—i.e., in the lobe which controls the action of the right arm and leg. Pondering on the use of the dexter half of the brain,—possibly in all unconscious cerebration, and in whatsoever may be genuine of the mysteries of planchette and spirit-rapping,—I came to the conclusion (shared, no doubt, by many other better qualified inquirers) that we dream with this lobe, and that the fantastic, un-moral, sprite- like character of dreams is, in some way, traceable to that fact. The practical inference then struck me : to bring back sleep when lost, we must quiet the conscious, thinking, sinister side of our brains, and bring into activity only the dream side, the dexter lobe. To do this, the only plan I could devise was to compel myself to put aside every waking thought, even soothing and pleasant ones, and every effort of daylight memory, such as counting numbers or the repetition of easy- flowing verses, the latter hailing been my not wholly un- successful practice for many years. Instead of all this, I saw I must think of a dream, the more recent the better, and go over and over the scene it presented. Armed with this idea, the next time I found myself awakening at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, instead of merely trying to banish painful thoughts and repeating, as was my habit, that recommendable soporific, " Paradise and the Peri," I reverted at once to the dream from which I had awakened, and tried to go on with it. In a moment I was asleep ! And from that time the experi- ment, often repeated, has scarcely ever failed. Not seldom the result is sudden as the fall of a curtain, and seems like a charm. A friend to whom I have confided my little discovery tells me that, without any preliminary theorising about the lobes of the brain, she had hit upon the same plan to produce sleep, and had found it wonderfully efficacious.
I should be very glad to hear if other sufferers can obtain the precious boon in the same way. The evils of prolonged wakefulness and of the drug-taking to which its victims are too often driven are alike so terrible, that I make no apology for offering my humble contribution of one more harmless remedy to obviate them.—I am, Sir, &c., F. P. C.
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