Part 6

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.

FOOTNOTES

Thomas E. Brown.

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. 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

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.