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Title: The Art of Natural Sleep - With definite directions for the wholesome cure of - sleeplessness: illustrated by cases treated in Northampton - and elsewhere
Author: Powell, Lyman P. (Lyman Pierson)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Footnotes are located at the end of the relevant chapter.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
By LYMAN P. POWELL
_The Art of Natural Sleep_
With Definite Directions for the
Wholesome Cure of Sleeplessness.
Illustrated by Cases from the
Emanuel Clinics in Boston and
Northampton
_Christian Science_
The Faith and Its Founder
THE ART
OF
NATURAL SLEEP
WITH
DEFINITE DIRECTIONS FOR THE WHOLESOME
CURE OF SLEEPLESSNESS, ILLUSTRATED
BY CASES TREATED IN NORTHAMPTON
AND ELSEWHERE
BY
LYMAN P. POWELL
Rector of St. John’s Church, Northampton, Mass.
Author of “Christian Science: Its Faith and Its
Founder”; Editor of “Historic Towns of
the United States”
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908
BY
LYMAN P. POWELL
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
To
MY WIFE
WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME BY EXAMPLE THE MORAL
VALUE OF SERENITY
PREFACE
This little book, like my book on Christian Science which appeared a
year ago, is the evolution of a pamphlet.
The first half of the pamphlet was written in the middle of a sleepless
night some years ago. The last half was written about two years ago,
after I had found relief by auto-suggestion from the lifelong bondage
of insomnia and had thereby doubled my capacity both for work and play.
First published in the spring of 1907 as my weekly message under the
heading of “The Parson’s Outlook” to the 5000 readers of _The Hampshire
Gazette_ in and about Northampton, the article on sleeplessness was
republished by request in the same paper some months later; then, as
the demand increased for it, in pamphlet form. This year past it has
been used in the Emmanuel Clinic, both in Boston and Northampton, with
such gratifying results that more than 300 sufferers from insomnia in
one part of the country or another have testified by letter or by word
of mouth to the benefit they have received from it.
At the suggestion of the Rev. Elwood Worcester, Ph.D., D.D., two
magazine editors, and two publishing houses, the pamphlet is now
enlarged into a book with the earnest hope that the suggestions it
contains may be of service to many whom the pamphlet, privately printed
and gratuitously distributed, could not reach at all.
There are books enough, perhaps, on the theory of sleep. The volume
by Marie de Manaceïne on _Sleep—Its Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene,
and Psychology_ will surely long remain the standard work. Dr. Upson’s
_Insomnia and Nerve Strain_ is based on the author’s discovery of the
vaso-neural circuit and will not be neglected by those who wish to
understand certain physical obstacles to sleep which have hitherto been
largely overlooked. _Religion and Medicine_, the official book of the
Emmanuel Movement, is indispensable to any knowledge of the drugless
cure of sleeplessness and other nervous functional disorders. And the
writings of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, and Dr. J.
Madison Taylor are, of course, of lasting value on this subject.
The purpose of this little book is very simple. It is designed to help
physicians, Emmanuel workers, and others who believe in the art of
natural sleep to aid those committed to their care. It is designed,
also, to be of service to the thousands who never go to anyone for aid
in learning how to sleep, and to this end is kept as free as possible
from all technical terms and all theoretical discussions.
To Dr. Worcester I owe the title of the book; to Rev. H. L. Taylor of
the Emmanuel Church staff certain of the illustrative cases from the
Emmanuel Clinic in Boston; to Mr. W. P. Cutter, Librarian of the Forbes
Library in Northampton, many special courtesies; and to Dr. Francis
S. Wilson, expert diagnostician and experienced practitioner, goodly
counsel in the preparation of the book.
Trusting that directly or indirectly this little book may set many an
unhappy victim of insomnia free from his hard bondage, I send it forth
in faith.
L. P. P.
ST. JOHN’S RECTORY,
NORTHAMPTON, MASS.
September 15, 1908.
CONTENTS
PAGE
OUR NATIONAL DISEASE 1
THEORIES OF SLEEP 5
WHAT SLEEP REALLY IS 8
THE NECESSITY OF SLEEP 12
INSOMNIA AND ITS CAUSES 15
THE VALUE OF DRUGS 18
THE REMOVAL OF ALL PHYSICAL
CAUSES 25
GENERAL DIRECTIONS 29
SECONDARY AIDS TO SLEEP 33
DR. LEARNED’S PLAN 35
RELAXATION AND RHYTHMIC
BREATHING 38
THE EMMANUEL METHOD 43
FAITH REQUIRED IN GOD AND MAN 47
THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT 53
SOME IMMEDIATE RESULTS 64
THE CO-OPERATION OF THE PATIENT 67
THE ULTIMATE EFFECT 72
ILLUSTRATIVE CASES 74
The Art of Natural Sleep
OUR NATIONAL DISEASE
Neurasthenia is now our national disease. Nervousness, nervous
exhaustion, nervous prostration, and kindred names are given to it by
the doctors. Whatever they may chance to call it, the doctors usually
agree as to its causes, symptoms, consequences.
Even the laity are now thoroughly informed as to the effect of
neurasthenia on the nerves and on the mind. It wears the nerves
threadbare and robs the mind of all serenity. It steals the zest from
work, the joy from play. It frequently reduces its unhappy victim to
the single occupation of worrying by day because he fears he will not
sleep at night, of worrying at night because he knows that worn and
haggard he will have no buoyancy and poise to play a man’s part in the
day to come.
The day’s work is done, when done at all, with the feverish inquietude
of the unrested brain. The evening’s pleasures, when infrequently he
ventures to take part in them, are clouded by the listlessness the lack
of sleep invariably brings. The silent night, when by any reach of the
imagination it can be thus described,
Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
is rendered hideous by the flitting of attention like a bird from
bough to bough, by the random running of the memory down each unhappy
recollection of the past, by the deflection of the mental vision till
it loses all perspective and disqualifies the sufferer to think
straight concerning even the trivial occurrences of everyday existence.
No wonder that in Kipling’s story _At the End of the Passage_, when
Spurstow finds his sleepless friend in the last stage of insomnia, he
sadly but severely says, “Sleeplessness of your kind being very apt to
relax the moral fibre in little matters of life and death, I’ll just
take the liberty of spiking your guns;” and then as a safeguard, robs
Hummil of his rifle and revolver.
THEORIES OF SLEEP
Various theories have at one time or another been suggested to account
for sleep. Some are both bewildering and absurd. There was a time when
it was seriously urged that sleep has in the thyroid gland its special
organ, but when someone in the interest of the theory excised the
thyroid gland, only to increase in certain instances the tendency to go
to sleep and stay asleep, the theory was at once abandoned even by its
staunchest advocates.
Finding that sleep usually follows fatigue, and that fatigue is a
chemical phenomenon, the so-called chemical theory was next set up,
and Sommer was quite sure that sleep comes as a consequence of the
exhaustion of the reserve of oxygen in the tissues and the blood,
and its replacement by carbonic acid during sleep. But here, too,
experimentation has been both inadequate and inconclusive.
The vaso-motor theory, as modified by Howell, that sleep is due to the
anæmia of the cortical layer of the brain, which invariably takes place
when the blood pressure in the arteries at the base of the brain falls,
has had a larger and a longer following. But convincing proof is yet to
be secured, and Dr. Percy G. Stiles of the Bellevue Hospital ends his
discussion of the subject with a guarded inference that there may be
truth in both the theories, and that eclecticism is in consequence the
wisest policy for the histologist.[1]
Footnotes
[1] _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1903.
WHAT SLEEP REALLY IS
Sleep, however we account for it, is “the resting time of
consciousness.”[2] To be sure, there is no absolute arrest of brain
activity. There is always, even in the soundest sleep, some cerebral
activity.[3] We dream. We have nightmares. We sometimes work out
problems in our sleep which have defied our every waking effort. There
is on record one instance of a college student who got up at three
o’clock to solve successfully, while sound asleep, a problem he could
not work out at all before he went to bed. There is another instance
well attested of a British consul in Syria who, after tearing up letter
after letter which he wrote to a Lebanon emir, went to sleep in sheer
despair, only to find when he awoke in the morning, that he had written
an elaborate letter which in every way satisfied the multitudinous
demands of Arabic diplomacy insistent to the last on all the niceties
of Oriental etiquette.[4]
Byron was right. Sleep is neither life nor death. It is a world apart.
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.
FOOTNOTES
[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.
FOOTNOTES
[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.
FOOTNOTES
[6] _Insomnia and Nerve Strain_, 12.
THE VALUE OF DRUGS
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]
Drugs are sure to make a difference in the morning. The dulness and
depression which they leave behind, in spite of all the claims of
those who put on the market their proprietary hypnotics, offset to
some extent the artificial sleep they have the night before produced.
Sometimes they fill the mind for days with morbid fancies and with
dangerous obsessions. Dr. J. Madison Taylor describes in some detail
the case of a lunatic under his care who developed homicidal tendencies
as a consequence of the administration of large doses of bromide, and
who lost the same the moment the bromide was withdrawn from him.[8] On
credible authority I am informed that there is among the alienists a
growing disposition, on this account, to give no drugs at all to induce
sleep in patients in the higher class of hospitals for the insane.
Morphia is not only no specific; it sometimes causes both a mental and
a physical depression worse than the insomnia it would relieve. In my
clinic I have one woman from whom morphia, administered to relieve
acute pain, took away the power to sleep at all, and for years she
stoically bore her pain rather than resort to morphia, until last
winter she found in the Emmanuel treatment immediate and unfailing
relief from pain, followed by sound sleep, which has only at rare
intervals been interrupted in months past.
Powerful as chloral is and useful in the thoughtful doctor’s hands
in various emergencies, especially in fevers where there is cerebral
excitement, it is a depressant, and he who contracts the chloral
habit invariably wishes at the last that he had waited for damnation
till after he was dead. Sulphonal, trional, veronal, paraldehyde, and
those proprietary hypnotics whose composition is withheld from the
public appear to be least harmful of all sleeping drugs. But they all
inebriate or stupefy the fragile cells of the brain, none too solid in
the best of us; and in the psychically weak or emotionally excitable
they may even put the delicately constructed thinking organ altogether
out of commission.
FOOTNOTES
[7] _Differential Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease_, 78, 355, 361,
457, 731.
[8] _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1905.
THE REMOVAL OF ALL PHYSICAL CAUSES
Though there may be no specific for insomnia in the drug store, the
complaint can often be relieved when the cause is wholly physical by
striking at its root. If the general practitioner fails to relieve
disturbances of the digestion, the stomach specialist should be
consulted. One of my patients, who had for two years suffered both
from insomnia and other troubles which had exhausted the ingenuity
and the resources of the local doctors he consulted, began to improve
as soon as a stomach specialist of national repute to whom I sent him
discovered by chemical analysis of the contents of his stomach an
incredibly excessive acidity, for which the proper prescription and
diet were at once suggested.[9]
In cases where insomnia is evidently due to some physical ailment
which cannot be at once located, a visit to the oculist, the dentist,
and even the throat and nose specialist should as a matter of course
be paid even if the patient has no conscious need of them. In at least
two instances which have come under my observation, the insomnia
disappeared after proper treatment of the eyes and teeth and throat,
though two general practitioners had suspected nothing wrong in one
case with the eyes, and in the other a visit to the throat specialist
was never once suggested by the doctor who sent the case to me for the
Emmanuel treatment.
FOOTNOTES
[9] As the proof comes, the patient in question writes me that his
insomnia was of the fitful type. He had so much trouble in going to
sleep promptly that he formed the habit of sitting up late and inducing
the sleep mood by reading. Since his treatment ended, he writes me
(Sept. 12th), “This summer I have retired at nine o’clock with few
exceptions, gone to sleep immediately, and risen at half past six in
the morning thoroughly refreshed.”
GENERAL DIRECTIONS
In many cases no local ailment would appear to be responsible for the
insomnia, and yet in every instance attention must be given to the
body’s entire needs. The habit of deep breathing from the diaphragm
must be developed and be regularly practised both indoors and out. This
alone sufficed in one complicated case to bring sleep every night.
The diet must be carefully chosen and followed in the face of every
importunity of a silly and capricious appetite. Tea and coffee, save
at the morning meal, must be in almost every case eliminated from the
menu. Constipation, which is responsible far oftener than we think for
sleeplessness, must be, whenever possible, at once corrected without
resort to purgatives and enemas.[10] The hot bath sometimes brings
sleep by relieving the congestion of the brain, but contraction of the
blood-vessels often follows with such promptness that the hot-water
bottle applied to the feet or the back of the neck or both is likely to
be of more service.
If running up and down stairs or exercise in that wood-pile now
imaginary in the average home leaves the sufferer as wide awake as
ever, Doctor J. B. Learned’s provision for taking exercise in bed
without displacement of the covering will sometimes relieve both the
cerebral congestion and the psychical exhilaration and let the wakeful
one drop off to sleep at the drowsy moment, which is apt to pass if
the exercise is taken out of bed and even scanty preparations have in
consequence to be made for retiring.
FOOTNOTES
[10] See Dubois’s _Psychical Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, ch.
xxiii, for the drugless cure of constipation.
SECONDARY AIDS TO SLEEP
When the sleeplessness is due to mental strain alone the cure can be
effected through the quiet mind. This is, I know, not always easy to
obtain. Conditions do not always favour it. Economic pressure does not
disappear at will with prices rising and with factories operating on
half-time. When the heart aches for
the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still,
grief is scarcely to be put away without some seeming hurt to the best
in us. For many a subject to insomnia the most that can apparently
be done is to stand cheerfully and confidently between him and the
temptation to grow morbid and melancholy, to keep the house as quiet as
circumstances will allow, to provide for the bedtime hour a glass of
hot milk with its pinch of salt in it, the hot malted milk unsweetened,
the clam bouillon, the beef extract, or a cup of cocoa which every
insomniast should take before he goes to bed, and by day and night to
soothe, sustain, and cheer the troubled spirit.
DR. LEARNED’S PLAN
The physiological problem is uncomplicated. As Dr. Learned, who more
than a quarter of a century ago cured himself of habitual insomnia by
getting control of the respiratory and circulatory functions in the
sleeping posture, has made clear, the problem is simply to shift the
belt of attention from the wildly whirling wheel of introspection to
the steadier wheel the will revolves.
By deep regular respirations, accompanied by rhythmical movements of
the head and hands and feet, Dr. Learned has frequently brought the
wandering attention back from some side track it sought in fitfulness
to the main line of the controlled consciousness. So surely has he in
recent years become convinced that the problem is usually psychical
that he no longer emphasises physical exercises in or out of bed.
Instead he provides an ingenious little tablet on which the wakeful one
with unlifted pencil steadily records in waving lines his inhalations
and his exhalations until at last, fatigued by the long exercise, the
brain becomes anæmic and sleep overtakes the drowsy mind.
RELAXATION AND RHYTHMIC BREATHING
To Mrs. Annie Payson Call[11] and Dr. Emily Noble we owe of late the
stress we lay on muscular relaxation and rhythmic breathing, which
practised faithfully will now and then bring sleep where drugs are
worse than useless. Muscular relaxation can be learned by any who
will take the trouble. The Delsarteans are already adepts at it. The
letting of the arms drop limp by the side as one sits in an easy chair,
the letting of the trunk sink unsupported against the easy chair as
though it were sinking into a yielding bank of snow, the letting of
the head fall forward or sideways without resistance will furnish even
to the slow of wits a visual image which will serve as a sufficient
pattern in the relaxation of the whole body.
Dr. Emily Noble, who has seen Oriental soldiers at the end of a long
march throw themselves in complete relaxation on their backs, gives in
her _Rhythmic Breathing plus Olfactory Nerve Influence on Respiration_
possibly the most practical of all directions for the mature in the
important art of relaxation. She bids him lie upon his back on a hard
surface, with head turned to one side in order to relieve the tension
on the muscles of the neck, with arms extended at right angles, with
the palms turned up, with feet turned out and spread for comfort at
least a foot apart.
The lungs are then to be cleared of their static air by a few deep
inhalations, made through the left nostril because in the average man
it seems to furnish a freer channel for the air than the right nostril.
Next the insomniast settles down to lighter rhythmic breathing, which
is nothing but the consequence of the conscious effort to make each
exhalation equal to each inhalation. He should take the “breath in as
gently as the fog creeps in from the sea.” He should let it out “as
the air goes out of little children’s balloons when it is allowed to
escape.”
As with experience all feeling of conscious effort passes, he will have
a sense of letting go, the muscles will of their own accord relax, the
quiet mind will come, especially if a pleasant thought be held steadily
before it, the insomniast will stretch and yawn, take instinctively if
he be in bed the sleep position, and pass off into a dreamless sleep
which will indeed knit up “the ravell’d sleave of care,” and make him
ready for a day of effective thinking and efficient action.
FOOTNOTES
[11] _The Heart of Good Health._
THE EMMANUEL METHOD
When sleeplessness can be directly traced to mental causes, the
Emmanuel treatment, if experiments made both in Boston and Northampton
are to be trusted, is as surely a specific as quinine for malaria. If
in any instance medical diagnosis can find no physical reason for the
sleeplessness, Emmanuel treatment is at once in order.
The sufferer is admitted to the Rector’s study. The very atmosphere
encourages frank speaking. Concealment of any fact or circumstance
which bears upon the case is prejudicial to improvement. I have once
after three treatments refused again to see a patient who had failed
to give me her whole confidence, until she was willing to speak out
with greater freedom. The physical habits are invariably considered and
corrected whenever there is need. Deep breathing is prescribed. Dr.
Learned’s method is sometimes suggested, and always Dr. Noble’s. Drugs
are from the first withheld. Tea, coffee, and all other stimulants
which act directly on the brain are banished from the evening meal. The
sufferer is encouraged as the bedtime hour draws near to give himself
to such interests as scatter the cares and worries and obsessions which
are then wont to gather like a cloud around the patient’s head.
For some a social evening is suggested, provided it be not too
exciting. For others the theatre, the symphony, or other form of public
entertainment serves the same purpose. For perhaps a larger number,
especially the preacher, or the teacher, or the literary worker, a
magazine, a novel with no miserable modern problem in it, or a standard
history will in a half-hour let down the mind to the sleep level. I
know one man who found Parkman’s histories a soporific boon; another
whom Green’s longer _History of the English People_ led on each night
to wholesome sleep; another, the head of a large sanitarium, who
sometimes saves himself from sleeplessness by reading after he has gone
to bed as dull a book as he can find, and recommends the same plan with
some profit to his patients.
FAITH REQUIRED IN GOD AND MAN
The main reliance, however, in the Emmanuel treatment is on faith,
reinforced first by hetero-suggestion and then by patient and
persistent auto-suggestion. The man who would be permanently free
from insomnia must be an optimist. He must have a philosophy of life
wholesome enough to keep him buoyant, cheerful, and serene amid all
the changes and the chances of this mortal life. With the Persian
he may hold that “He’s a Good Fellow, and ’twill all be well;” with
Socrates that “To the good man no evil thing can happen;” or with St.
Paul that “All things work together for good to them that love the
Lord.”
Whatever language he may use in the formulation of his life philosophy,
he must believe with all his heart and soul that life in spite of all
appearances is worth living, that there is love and goodness at the
heart of things, that the word God, whatever be its content, does
stand for a concept indispensable in our everyday existence, and that
there is somewhere, everywhere, One who, by a paradox as strange as it
is true, is both the centre and circumference of all that has been,
is, and ever is to be—The Absolute and Unconditioned wherever we
may chance to be in time or space. “If I climb up into heaven, Thou
art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the
wings of the morning: and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;
even there also shall Thy hand lead me: and Thy right hand shall hold
me.”[12]
A man who wants that serenity of mind on which the soundest sleep
invariably depends must get right and keep right with God, whether he
defines Him in the terms of Persia, Greece, or Christianity.
But this is not enough. A man must be right also with his fellow-men.
He must love his neighbour as he loves his God. “He that loveth not
his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not
seen?” He must have more than a languid interest in his brother. He
must wish him better than well. He must have done forever with sharp
practice, hard bargaining, ungracious criticism, and that subtle
disloyalty which often through sheer cowardice stands mute while
slander wags its tongue or envy shoots its Parthian arrows back as it
retreats.
With the spirit’s eye he must see even in the poorest and the meanest
of his fellows some charm which others have not found. He must with the
Christ insight pierce to the heart of the roughest boulder that was
ever hewn from the hard mountain-side of seamy human nature and let
loose the imbedded angel always there and always struggling to be free.
No man has any right to sleep, in fact to any of God’s better gifts,
who goes through life with slanting eye and lowering brow sullenly
protesting to himself:
As I walked by myself,
I talked to myself,
And thus myself did say to me:
Look to thyself,
And take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee.
FOOTNOTES
[12] Psalm cxxxix., 7-9.
THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT
When the insomniast is ready to pay this double price of love to God
and love to man for the peace that passeth understanding and that also
bringeth sleep, he is ready for Emmanuel treatment. Seated in the
Morris chair before the smouldering fire with curtains drawn, he is
taught to relax his muscles, the cortical layer of the brain is quieted
by soothing suggestions, and then standing behind the chair the
Emmanuel worker begins the treatment somewhat thus in a low monotone:
You are now relaxed in body and quieted in mind. You are to let your
thoughts languidly follow mine expressed in words. Do not offer any
mental opposition. I shall say nothing which your mind will not
instinctively accept and cherish.
Fix your thoughts on God. Think of Him not alone as the All-Father but
also as the Universal Mind in which your mind exists exactly as each
individual thought floats in your mind. Think of Him not merely as
your Heavenly Father but also as the Universal Spirit on which your
soul depends for every breath of spiritual life, just as your body is
dependent for its every breath of physical existence on the air you
breathe. Believe that in this larger, higher, truer sense, “In Him we
live and move and have our being.”
Now Universal Mind or Universal Spirit is wholesomeness and love,
harmony and power. Realise that when your soul breathes in the
atmosphere in which it lives it breathes in wholesomeness and love,
harmony and power. But it is possible, in the exercise of the free will
with which you are in the nature of the case endowed, to fill up the
soul with morbidness and selfishness, disunity and weakness, so that
there is no room in it for God’s wholesomeness and love, His harmony
and power.
If thou couldst empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf,
And say, “This is not dead,”
And fill thee with Himself instead.
But thou art all replete with very _Thou_,
And hast such shrewd activity,
That, when He comes, He says: “This is enow
Unto itself—’t were better let it be:
It is so small and full, there is no room for Me.”[13]
You do not sleep because you are “all replete with very _Thou_.” You
have filled up your soul with thoughts of self, or thoughts of others
from the point of view of self. You have worried when you should have
cast your care on Him; “for He careth for you.” You have yielded to all
sorts of foolish fears, forgetful that “perfect love casteth out fear.”
You have been self-centred, though God Himself was so far centred out
of self that “He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
In the silence of this quiet hour put your worries and your fears away
and swing your centre out of self. Open wide the windows of your soul
and let the Spirit in of wholesomeness and love, of harmony and power.
Believe the Spirit will come in. Interpret in the terms of Spirit those
veracious words of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door, and
knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to
him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”
Wait for the incoming Spirit. Wait in faith and confidence. Remember
that “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary;
they shall walk, and not faint.”
With your mind filled with the Spirit of wholesomeness and love, of
harmony and power, it will be at rest; it will know the peace that
passeth understanding. All nerve-strain will go. Sleep will come
to-night. Sleep will come to-morrow night. Sleep will come every
night. Sound sleep, re-creating sleep so long denied you, will be yours
at last. The day will never know again its feverish inquietude. Work
will have its zest, and play its joy. The silent night will lose its
morbid fancies and its horrid nightmares, and you will each morning
wake with the song upon your lips:
The dark hath many dear avails:
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly muse.
You have done with sleeplessness forever. You go out from this room
beneath the rooftree of God’s sanctuary, a new creature in Christ
Jesus. Claim your new privilege in Jesus’ name. Act henceforth on the
comforting assurance that you are to go to sleep as soon as you have
gone to bed, and sleep the whole night through.
Keep by day as well as night the serenity you here have found. Awake
with the morning light into the thoughts of this first treatment. Keep
them in the background of your consciousness the whole day through.
Take a few minutes every day to go into the silence as you now are,
and think these thoughts again in proper sequence. Take them up into
your heart and brood upon them all the day. Work them into the warp
and woof of your inmost soul so that “neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature” shall be able
to separate you from them. Make them yours and keep them yours forever
and forever. And you shall sleep the sleep of the quiet mind and the
God-filled soul in all the years to come.[14]
FOOTNOTES
[13] Thomas E. Brown.
[14] Subsequent treatments are usually a logical development of this.
See also Henry Wood’s _New Thought Simplified_. In the author’s next
volume to appear in 1909, he expects to publish a complete series of
suggestive treatments for nervous functional disorders.
SOME IMMEDIATE RESULTS
Again and again one treatment of this sort—faith reinforced by
reiterated suggestion—has sufficed to break up the most obstinate
insomnia. One man on the verge of suicide from hitherto incurable
insomnia went home from this first treatment to sleep soundly for
several nights thereafter. Another man on whom a heart-breaking
disappointment had swept down without a word of warning went home
to sleep eight hours and a half for the first time in many nights. A
trained nurse so long on night duty that she had slipped her sleep cog
to the demoralisation of her entire nervous system slept normally again
after but one visit to me.
A college instructor sleepless on the verge of a new year of academic
strain thus secured the long night’s sleep she coveted the day before
the opening of college. A wife and mother overwhelmed by a domestic
tragedy after six weeks of drugged sleep went home from her first
treatment with a shining face to sleep ever after without taking any
drugs. A college girl worn sleepless by the heat and burden of earning
her own living while she kept up her standing in the college, reported
marked improvement after her first treatment. And a neurasthenic who
had lost all hope of ever sleeping better slept so much better after
a single treatment that she insists in spite of all my protests in
placing her experience among the modern miracles.
THE CO-OPERATION OF THE PATIENT
In most cases, of course, more is necessary than one treatment.[15]
Sometimes a dozen treatments are required. And at every stage the
patient’s close co-operation is of utmost consequence. In fact, the
cure can never be effected without it. To faith reinforced by the
Emmanuel worker’s suggestions must be added the auto-suggestions of the
patient. He must will to keep the loving attitude toward God and man.
He must cease to worry about sleep. He must never mention his symptoms
to anyone except the Emmanuel worker who is treating him.
He must cultivate a heavenly unconcern about himself. He must keep
saying to himself the whole day through: It does not matter anyway. If
I sleep, well and good. If I do not sleep I will not worry over it. To
lie awake at night is not so terrible as I once thought. Bed is for
rest as well as sleep. The worry over lack of sleep hurts more than
sleeplessness itself. Rest is possible even when I can not sleep. Happy
thoughts will rob the darkness of its gloom and minimise nerve-strain.
If I keep still in my normal sleep position eight hours every night
in bed, if I relax every muscle and let it stay relaxed; if I breathe
lightly, regularly, rhythmically in a well-ventilated room, making
sure the early morning light will not strike across my face and wake
me up; if I simulate sleep in every way I can; if I shut out all
preoccupation, expect each night to go to sleep, and steadily hour
after hour suggest sleep to myself in words like these I shall surely
go to sleep:
I am going to sleep. I shall not lie awake. I cannot lie awake. I am
going to sleep. The tired eyes are closing. The blood is flowing from
my brain to my extremities. There is no longer any pressure on the
brain. The muscles are relaxing. Sleep is stealing over all my senses.
They are growing numb. I am getting drowsy, drowsy. I am softly
sinking into sleep, dreamless sleep. I am sinking deeper, deeper,
deeper. I am almost asleep. I am asleep, asleep, asleep. I am asleep.
FOOTNOTES
[15] It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that no charge is ever made
for the Emmanuel treatment, though grateful patients sometimes make a
thank offering to the church of which the Emmanuel worker is the Rector.
THE ULTIMATE EFFECT
Even if, in spite of this, one sometimes fails to sleep, one will at
least be free from the nerve-strain which a night of worry about sleep
invariably brings. And if, in the face of every discouragement and
every temptation to lapse from this wholesome attitude toward sleep,
one habitually practises each night some such auto-suggestions, he has
forever turned his face away from chronic sleeplessness.
He may not always sleep at will. He may not always live up to the light
vouchsafed to him. But he will sleep much better than he slept before.
He will be free from the morbidness and worry of insomnia. He will have
faith where he had fear, peace where he had the troubled mind, and the
light at eventide of a night which is not dark with griefs and graves.
More than this, he will sleep. He will sleep habitually—to his body’s
health, his mind’s contentment, and his soul’s supreme delight.
ILLUSTRATIVE CASES
I. CURED BY SUGGESTION ALONE
_A.—Waking Suggestion_
1. The Emmanuel Clinic in Boston reports the case of a distinguished
lawyer who after nine months of insomnia came to Emmanuel Church for
counsel. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His habit was to
take his work and worries every night to bed with him. He was advised
to submit to the rest cure under a good neurologist. He replied that,
with important cases coming up at once for trial, rest was impossible.
In fact, he could at most spend a few hours in Boston. The causes of
insomnia were then explained to him. Suggestions were given looking
toward self-help. The importance of cheerful and uplifting thoughts was
emphasised. He went away an hour later to report in a few weeks that he
was entirely cured and had not felt so well since he was a boy.
2. Dubois (p. 340) speaks of a physician twenty-three years of age who
had suffered for nine months from persistent insomnia. By bromides,
bathing, travel, and the cessation of all work, he had obtained only
transient results. Dubois drew his attention to the psychic causes of
insomnia, counselled the immediate abandonment both of the treatment he
had been giving himself and of all apprehension of insomnia. In a few
days sleep returned, the convalescent resumed his customary duties, and
was soon completely well again.
_B.—Profound Suggestion_
Forel (p. 252) describes the case of a working-girl who suffered for a
year and a half from extreme sleeplessness. All means for her relief
failed. Forel induced profound suggestion, let her sleep about an hour
every day while she was still in his clinic room, and after three weeks
discharged her completely cured and able regularly to sleep nine hours
out of every twenty-four.
2. CURED BY FAITH REINFORCED BY SUGGESTION
_A.—Inability to go to sleep on going to bed_
A clergyman forty years of age had inherited a tendency to
sleeplessness. Even as a child it was not uncommon for him to lie awake
an hour or two after getting into bed. As he passed into his teens
the presence of his brother or a boy friend in the same bed would
invariably keep him wide awake the whole night through. At college the
unusual strain of extra work or of examinations was likely to drive
sleep entirely away, and only with the help of bromides at special
seasons was he able to get through his studies and take his place at
last among the honour men.
His first years out of college were spent in graduate study and
educational work, and were made miserable by the gradual increase of
insomnia, which shut him out of many social pleasures and impaired his
efficiency.
His first ten years in the ministry were checkered by so many stubborn
attacks of insomnia that he was more than once on the verge of a
complete breakdown, from which the drugs the doctors gave him furnished
only temporary relief.
Two years ago, after six weeks of sleeplessness during which he had
at his doctor’s orders taken a hypnotic every night, he was able to
sleep at most three hours out of every twenty-four and was haunted by
obsessions and pervasive fears. When even morphia failed to induce
anything more than extreme drowsiness and the heart’s action was so
weak that strychnine was prescribed to make it function properly, one
sleepless night a physician peremptorily bade him keep in the sleep
position and never move, breathe regularly, keep his eyes closed as in
sleep, and in every way imaginable to simulate sleep.
This proved to be the turning point in his experience. Sleep came night
after night in consequence of his unvarying obedience to the doctor’s
orders. From one source or another he discovered how to relax and
to suggest sleep to himself. Within a month he had learned to sleep
at will, and only once in two years, when for some weeks there was
continuous local pain, has his sleep been interrupted. The average both
of physical and of mental health has been at least doubled, and these
two years past he has done, without fatigue of mind or body, at least
twice as much work as in any two years of his life before.
_B.—Waking in the middle of the night_
A widow, seventy-three years of age, suffering for twelve years from
neurasthenia, was apt to wake about the middle of every night and to
go to sleep no more. The loss of sleep was bad enough, but the morbid
fancies which invariably came in swarms sometimes all but drove her to
distraction. There was such a bad family history as to sleep and such
poor circulation with its inevitable cold feet, that the physician
gave me little hope of relieving her insomnia. During the first month
of her treatment I, therefore, confined myself almost entirely to
the upbuilding of her faith by a course of optimistic reading and by
suggestion. I seldom spoke about her sleeplessness at all. To her
surprise and mine in a few weeks her sleep began to improve. At the
end of two months, though she still awoke two or three nights every
week, no morbid fancies came. She filled up her mind with wholesome
thoughts, repeated again and again the auto-suggestions on page 68,
and usually awoke almost as much refreshed as though she had slept the
whole night through. Now after almost a year she reports what used to
be one bad night out of every four or five, but as compared with the
bad nights—four or five a week—of former years it were better called,
she thinks, a good night than a bad one.
_C.—Waking early in the morning_
1. A college girl of unusual ability and character had practically
all her life been inclined to wake at two or three o’clock in the
morning and often go to sleep no more; or if she went to sleep, to
sleep badly and be subject to hideous dreams and horrible nightmares.
After one treatment, June 15th, she began at once to sleep much better.
Though she sometimes woke as formerly at two or three, she at once by
relaxation and auto-suggestion usually went off to sleep again and
suffered little from dreams and nightmares. She has had two treatments
since, and is not only much improved in body but is happier and more
serene in mind.
2. The Emmanuel Clinic in Boston reports the case of an unmarried
woman, fifty-two years old, who usually slept four hours a night,
awaking at 2.30 and never sleeping more. Her treatment was begun June
20, 1907, and was followed by immediate improvement. By July 1, 1907,
she was sleeping without waking eight hours every night, and reported
August, 1908, that the improvement had become permanent.
_D.—Semi-sleep_
1. A college girl had never had the feeling of being sound asleep. She
thought she was half conscious the night through. What sleep she got
never seemed to refresh her. She came to me for treatment, February 7,
1908, slept somewhat better for a night or two, and came back, February
14th, 18th, 25th, for other treatments. On March 13th she reported
that though she was not completely cured she was sleeping more soundly
and felt better in every way. There was in this case the unhappy
complication of organic heart trouble.
2. To the Emmanuel Clinic in Boston came, January 2, 1908, a clergyman
forty-nine years old who reported that for years he had never slept,
but merely dozed. He gave up preaching in 1903; then resumed it only to
abandon it again in April, 1907. After treatment from January 2nd to
March 9th he was discharged, much improved, and on May 4th he reported
that he was still improving, and is now sleeping well from six and a
half to seven hours every night.
_E.—Insomnia from psychical shock_
A woman thirty-four years old was plunged into insomnia six years ago
by the psychical shock which followed a violent attack made on her by
an insane woman. Her habit afterwards was to lie awake for three or
four hours after retiring, and then to sleep about two hours every
night. Whenever she lay down to sleep, whether her eyes were open or
closed, she felt herself surrounded by people, some of whom had been
dead for several years, and one of whom she fancied wished to kill
her. To the hallucinations dizziness was often added. Bromides which
she had long been taking began at last to lose their effect. Treatment
of her was begun at the Emmanuel Clinic in Boston on February 25,
1908. By March 10th she was sleeping better, though not soundly, and
for thirteen nights the hallucinations had been absent. April 8th
she reported that the visions still came now and then but were fewer
and less terrifying. By May 21st the dizziness had disappeared, the
hallucinations had not come for several weeks, her mind was clear, her
sleep was much improved, and she was sure that she was getting well.
_F.—Insomnia from family trouble_
A mother forty-one years of age had suffered several family
bereavements. Her children had been sick more than is common. Her
brother had been burned to death. She herself had undergone a surgical
operation. For seven years she had suffered from insomnia, never even
temporarily relieved except by taking sulphonal, trional, etc. It
seemed to be the fear of sleeplessness that usually kept her from her
sleep. Under treatment at the Emmanuel Clinic in Boston from September
21, 1907, to January 27, 1908, she steadily improved, and is now in
every way much better.
THE END
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Insomnia and Nerve Strain
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"An interesting theory in explanation of many cases of insomnia and
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“The work is technical, and for the profession rather than the lay
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