Sleeping draught

“ I had no outside covering, neither had the seamen, but labor compelled us to sleep. I awoke about day-light, and my feelings were indescribable; the morning was boisterous, the fires were wholly extinct, and had been so a long time. The men from fatigue had fallen into a deep sleep, and snoring around. I attempted to rise, but was surprised to find my limbs so stiff and nerveless; my senses too seemed almost as stiff as my bones, I felt light headed, and half crazy, the effect of sleeping on wet ground. ”

“ I have often spoken of my sleeping and waking, but thus our lives are spent. In spite of the storm raging around me, the seas thundering on the rock, and the wind whistling through the beacon, a drowsiness overpowered me, and I found myself dropping off to sleep. I was still conscious in some degree how I was situated. I felt all the time an overpowering sense of danger. Sometimes I was in my little boat, gliding calmly over the ocean ”

“ It was my foolish imagination, the effect of the poison.
The night was full of torture. My bed seemed to lift itself under me, then to fall again, then up again! I used autosuggestion: “At night all the Numbers must sleep; sleeping at night is a duty just like working during the day. To sleep at night is necessary for the next day’s work. Not to sleep at night is criminal.” ”

“ Everybody is asleep, or at least reclining in the most shady rooms, with closed eyes, and with the body abandoned to that species of somnolency which is neither sleeping nor waking, and which from that very fact is filled with such sweet and voluptuous reveries—inhaling at deep draughts the artificial breeze produced by artfully contrived currents of air, and in a word indulging in what is generally called in the torrid zones a siesta. ”

“ Some men stood at the edge of the causeway fixed in dreary misery, finding no room to sleep. Outside, on a seat in the blackness and the rain, a woman sat sleeping, while the water trickled and hung heavily at the ends of her loosened strands of hair. Her hands were pushed in the bosom of her jacket. She lurched forward in her sleep, started, and one of her hands fell out of her bosom. She sank again to sleep. George gripped my arm. ”

“ Here the question comes, in what part of the mechanism does the change occur that thus causes the suspension of the power of the Will and the partial severance of the Conscious Self from its normal control of the body? How does sleep accomplish so great a revolution? If the whole mental mechanism were inactive in sleep this question would be answered easily. We should say, “the entire of the brain is sleeping and therefore the whole mechanism is at rest. ”

“ These rare cases are not the only ones in which [Pg 102] during sleep movements are produced by what remains of the will; for it is by virtue of certain direct sensations that a sleeping man moves his arm to brush away the flies that may be on his face, that he draws up the bedclothes so as to cover himself carefully ”

“ So powerful are the necessities thus dependent upon the harmony between our organization and the movements of the earth, that if the habit be formed of sleeping at other hours than those which are usually devoted to that purpose, the full complement of sleep is still needful to satisfy the demand for rest. ”

“ Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! ”

“ The sleeping state or the psychical change to sleep, whatsoever it be, is brought about by the child being sent to sleep or compelled thereto by fatigue, only assisted by the removal of all stimuli which might open other objects to the psychical apparatus. ”

“ But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come. ”

“ All things are hushed, as nature's self lay dead;
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head;
The little birds, in dreams, their songs repeat,
And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat.
Even lust and envy sleep; ”

“ Time found our tired love sleeping,
And kissed away his breath;
But what should we do weeping,
Though light love sleep to death?
We have drained his lips at leisure,
Till there's not left to drain
A single sob of pleasure,
A single pulse of pain. ”

“ She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity. ”

“ We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds; ”

“ Waking or sleeping, it seemed that she constantly saw that dark body dropping, swift and silent, into the cold, grim sea. ”

“ The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. ”

“ How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with their beauty! The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; ”

“ The Sun had long since, in the lap
Of THETIS, taken out his nap, 30
And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn
From black to red began to turn,
When HUDIBRAS, whom thoughts and aking,
'Twixt sleeping kept all night and waking,
Began to rub his drowsy eyes, 35
And from his couch prepar'd to rise,
Resolving to dispatch the deed
He vow'd to do with trusty speed. ”

“ Sleeping was her latest discovery. “It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious.” ”

“ The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. ”

“ Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. ”

“ Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted [9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer ”

“ The restlessness is allayed, and a quiet state of body and mind succeeds. It needs but a suggestion to induce him to retire for the night. After being a few minutes in bed, sleep steals over him, and his heavy breathing tells that he is in the world of dreams. ”

“ A flood of song wakes us at the earliest daylight; and the shy and solitary Veery, after the Vesper-Bird has concluded his evening hymn, pours his few pensive notes into the very bosom of twilight, and makes the hour sacred by his melody. But after twilight is sped, and the moon rises to shed her meek radiance over the sleeping earth, the Nightingale is not here to greet her rising, and to turn her melancholy beams into the cheerfulness of daylight. ”

“ I felt cold, and made a rousing fire, and went to bed, and had a violent perspiration, and out popped the itch again like a porpoise, and made me scratch so hard and incessantly, that I could not sleep of nights, and I was in a horrible predicament, and I got alarmed, and went to Providence, and immediately to bed, as my physical energies were utterly exhausted, from loss of rest, and from my eternal scratching, and off I went into a thundering snore. My brother William arrived from New York during the night, and got into my bed, and I slept so soundly that he vainly strove to awake me. ”

“ Now and then a faint scream from high aloft declared the passage of some lonely seabird; and the ceaseless swash and plash of the sleepless sea filled out in my mind a picture of home-sick misery. It is no time, or at least the worst of all times, to reflect on one's woes in the night when just awakened from dreams: better turn over and go to sleep again. ”

“ But while they were thus awaiting the proper moment, tired Nature pressed her claims upon them, and the hard labour that they had undergone during the past two nights, which had allowed them not a wink of sleep, caused them to feel very drowsy, and at length they fell soundly asleep on the bed. ”

“ And late that night, when, thoroughly wearied out, I went to bed, and from sheer exhaustion would be dropping off to sleep, from time to time it would pierce through my numbing senses, and waken me sharply, as if some one had violently pulled me, so that I would start up, yet for a moment not realize what it was that had wakened me. ”

“ But, with the young, sleep is a paramount necessity, and nature insists on obedience to its merciful law. I remember feeling drowsy; starting up from the bed, and walking about my room, to keep myself awake ”

“ She goes to bed, but, for the first few hours, she is too much excited to sleep, towards morning, when the air is pure and invigorating, and, when to breathe it, would be to inhale health and life, she falls into a feverish slumber, and wakes not until noon-day. ”

“ He was fast asleep—he can't even say at what hour—when he was awakened by the thrusting of a gag into his mouth and a bandage over his eyes. He thought at first it was a nightmare and he tried to spring out of bed. ”

“ Said the Englishman to Voltaire, "This was the day upon which we were to commit suicide." "Ah, yes," said Voltaire, "so we were, but to-day my bowels moved well."
4. The disturbed sleep, either as insomnia or an unrestful, dream-disturbed slumber, is a distressing symptom. For we look to the bed as a refuge from our troubles, as a sanctuary wherein is rebuilded our strength. We may link work and sleep as the two complementary functions necessary for happiness. If sleep is disturbed, so is work, and with that our purposes are threatened. ”

“ Third, noctambulism, or sleep-walking, in which the action, though complicated in its character, and different from the ordinary waking occupations of the patient, appears to be the result of automatic processes, constituting a dream that is acted out in time and space. Fourth, somnambulism with exaltation of the faculties, producing delirium with conscious movements during the crisis. ”

“ We never sit down, either to dinner, or supper, but the least noise spreads a general alarm, and prevents us from enjoying the comforts of our meals. The very appetite proceeding from labour and peace of mind is gone! Our sleep is disturbed by the most frightful dreams! Sometimes I start awake, as if the great hour of danger was come; at other times the howling of our dogs seems to announce the arrival of the enemy: we leap out of bed, and run to arms ”

“ So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name—for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams—a sleep that was a chaos. Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild, agonizing shriek! ”

“ Then we wrapped ourselves up, Auguste in his greatcoat, I in my blanket, on a bed of ferns prepared by Boudoux, and we tried to sleep.
I say we tried to sleep, but, although the air around us was balmy, the forest quiet, the moonlight serene, the expectation of pleasure keeps one awake almost as much as pleasure itself. It is very rarely I sleep the night before a hunting expedition, and only when life is more seriously preoccupied do these pleasant attacks of insomnia cease. ”

“ Sleep we cannot call it for it was more of the nature of a waking dream than refreshing slumbers; and, after enduring two or three hours of increasing restlessness, he sprang from his couch, and, while it was yet early morn, strolled forth to refresh his fevered brain. ”

“ Luncheon ended, Marjorie Garth left us to go and write letters to be sent ashore in the launch for posting. I repaired to my cabin to snatch a little sleep in the siesta hour; for I was very tired after our disturbed night. But though the gently whirring fan kept the atmosphere nicely cool and my bed invited repose, I could not sleep. Now that I was alone again, I found my thoughts continually recurring to the slip of oilsilk with its enigmatic message.
I have always found that short commons of sleep is an excellent mental tonic. ”

“ Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general conduct of life—a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance in the moods and emotions—may upset the sleep capacity. Those in whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent, become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences. If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere. ”

“ I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me. ”