The Art of Natural Sleep

Part 1

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

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.

Part 2

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.

Part 3

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.

Footnotes

Popular Science Monthly, September, 1903.

WHAT SLEEP REALLY IS

Sleep, however we account for it, is “the resting time of consciousness.” To be sure, there is no absolute arrest of brain activity. There is always, even in the soundest sleep, some cerebral activity. 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.

Byron was right. Sleep is neither life nor death. It is a world apart.

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