A Cure for Sleeplessness

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 311, 27 October 1888, Page 4

A Cure for Sleeplessness

A coiiKKSPONDUNT ot the 'Spectator' write& : — The terrible evil of insomnia has so many different sources that the utmost we can hope from any single artifice is to afl'ord relief from it under one special i'otm. j A - enture bo think L have hit upon a plan which thus remedies a very common (not an aggiavabed) kind of slcople^oness ; and, with your permibbion, will endeavour to make yonr readers who may be fellowbuflerers, sharers in my little di&covery. Ib is now, I believe, g-onerally accepted thab our conscious, daylight, thinking processes are carried on in the sinister half of our brains — \e. , in the lobe which controls tho action of the right arm and lop. Pondering on the use of the dexter bait ol the brain— possible in ail unconscious cerebration, and in Avhafr-oever may be genuine ot the mysteries of ])lnnckette im<\ spirit-rapping— l came to the conclusion (shared, no doubt, by many other better qualified inquirers) that we dream with this lobe, and that the fantastic, unmoral, sprite-like character of dreams is, in some way, tnicciblo to that tact. The practical inference then struck me : to bring back sleep when lost, «c must quiet the concious, 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 eflort of day light memory, such as counting numbers or the repetition oi easy-flowing verses, tho latter having been my not wholly unsucce&ful practice for many j cars. 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 two or three o'clock in the morning, instead of merely trying to banish painful thoughts, and repeating as was my habit, tiiat recom mendable soporific, ' Paradise and tho Pen,' 1 1 everted at once to the dieam from "u hich 1 had awakened, and tried to go on with it. In a moment I was asleep ! And from that time the experiment, often repented, hih scarcely ever failed. Not seldom the result i& as 6u.de 1 en a^> ihe fall of a cm tain, and seems like a, charm. A friend to whom 1 have confided my little discovery tells me that, without any preliminary theorising about the lobe^ ot the brain, die had hit upon ihe same plan to produce sleep, and had found it wonderfully eilicaeious.