The art of natural sleep
Date: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Insomnia; Sleep; Emmanuel movement

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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: Lyman P. Powell

Release date: June 29, 2020 [eBook #62492]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF NATURAL SLEEP ***

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Call11 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.

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.

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

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.

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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FOOTNOTES

1 Popular Science Monthly, September, 1903.

2 Manaceïne, 62, 69, 70.

3 Dr. J. Madison Taylor in the Popular Science Monthly, September, 1905.

4 Thomson’s Brain and Personality, 314.

5 Psychological Review, September, 1896.

6 Insomnia and Nerve Strain, 12.

7 Differential Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease, 78, 355, 361, 457, 731.

8 Popular Science Monthly, September, 1905.

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.”

10 See Dubois’s Psychical Treatment of Nervous Disorders, ch. xxiii, for the drugless cure of constipation.

11 The Heart of Good Health.

12 Psalm cxxxix., 7-9.

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.

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.

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Table of Contents

- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE ART OF NATURAL SLEEP
- PREFACE
- CONTENTS
- OUR NATIONAL DISEASE
- THEORIES OF SLEEP
- WHAT SLEEP REALLY IS
- THE NECESSITY OF SLEEP
- INSOMNIA AND ITS CAUSES
- THE VALUE OF DRUGS
- THE REMOVAL OF ALL PHYSICAL CAUSES
- GENERAL DIRECTIONS
- SECONDARY AIDS TO SLEEP
- DR. LEARNED’S PLAN
- RELAXATION AND RHYTHMIC BREATHING
- THE EMMANUEL METHOD
- FAITH REQUIRED IN GOD AND MAN
- THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT
- SOME IMMEDIATE RESULTS
- THE CO-OPERATION OF THE PATIENT
- THE ULTIMATE EFFECT

- ILLUSTRATIVE CASES

- I. CURED BY SUGGESTION ALONE

- A.—Waking Suggestion

- B.—Profound Suggestion

- 2. CURED BY FAITH REINFORCED BY SUGGESTION

- A.—Inability to go to sleep on going to bed
- B.—Waking in the middle of the night
- C.—Waking early in the morning
- D.—Semi-sleep
- E.—Insomnia from psychical shock
- F.—Insomnia from family trouble

- FOOTNOTES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE