The Strange Caprice of Sleep.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 448, 22 February 1890, Page 3

The Strange Caprice of Sleep.

Sleep is a strangely capricious visitant to all of us. Even professed sufferers from insomnia can often sleep well, too well, at the wrong time and place. Sermons have a fatally soporific .effect on many people. Bishop Latimer tells a story of a ‘certain gentlewoman ” who averred that she was going ‘to St. Paul’s to the preaching ; for I slept not last night, and I never fail of a good nap there.’ Much sympathy is felt for the sleepless, but little is evinced for the naturally drowsy. Yet the excess of powers of slumber is almost as trying as the lack of this ability. Physiologists tell us that our senses fall asleep, not all at once, but in rotation. The sense of sight first yields to the approach of slumber; after that the senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch become drowsy in succession. As our sense of sight is the first to fall asleep, so it is the least easy to awaken : slumberers who wake at a call or a touch will be undisturbed by a strong light. The sense of touch rarely slumbers altogether; changes of position in sleep are said to arise from uneasiness of this sense, and the lightest touch generally suffices to awake a sleeper who has withstood the influence of both noise and light. Pain, grief, acute mental anxiety do not always banish sleep. Victims have slumbered during the intervals of torture ; condemned criminals have slept peacefully on the eve of execution.