Lyman P. Powell

“ 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.51 “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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 to11 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. ”

“ 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 diet30 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. ”

“ 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 and56 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. ”

“ 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 68 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. ”

“ 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 nights13 and days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 which9 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. ”

“ 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 theory6 was at once abandoned even by its staunchest advocates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, the42 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. ”

“ If I sleep, well and good. If I do not sleep I will not worry over it. To lie69 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 often31 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. ”

“ But20 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 fancies21 and with dangerous obsessions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 is32 apt to pass if the exercise is taken out of bed and even scanty preparations have in consequence to be made for retiring. ”

“ 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 sleep66 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. ”

“ 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 Breathing40 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Worry, fear, grief,16 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. ”

“ 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, and45 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. ”

“ Powerful as chloral is and useful23 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 ”

“ 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 the46 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”