A Cure for Sleeplessness.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 866, 5 October 1888, Page 4

A Cure for Sleeplessness.

A correspondent of the Spectator writes : The terrible evil of insomnia has so many different sources, that the utmost we can hope from any single artifice is to afford relief from it under one special form. I venture to think I have hit upon a plan which thus remedies a very common (not an aggravated) kind of sleeplessness, and, with your permission, will endeavour to make your readers who may be fellow-sufferers, sharers in my little discovery. It is now, I believe, generally accepted that our conscious, daylight, •thinking processes are carried on in the sinister half of our brains—i.e., in the lobe which controls the action of the right arm and leg. Pondering on the use of the dexter half of the brain—possible in all unconscious cerebration, and in whatsoever may be genuine of ;the - mysteries of plauchette and spirit-rapping—l came to the conclusion (shared, no doubt, by many other better qualified inquirers) that we dream with this lobe, and that the fantastic, unmoral, spritelike character of dreams is, in some way, traceable to that fact. The practical inference then struck me-to bring back sleep when lost, we must qniet the conscious, thinking, sinister side of our brains, and bring into aotiviby only the dream side, the dexter lobe. To do this, the only plan I could devise was to compel myself to put aside every waking thought, even soothing and pleasant ones, and every effort of daylight memory, such as counting numbers or the repetition of easy-flowing verses, the latter having been my not wholly unsuccessful practice for many years. Instead of all this, I saw I must think of a dream, the more recent the better, and go over and over the scene it presented. Armed with this idea, the next time I found myself awakening at two or three o’clock in the morning, instead of merely trying to banish painful thoughts, and repeating, as was my habit, that recoinmendable soporific ‘ Paradise and the Peri,’ I reverted at once to the dream from which I had awakened, and tried to go on with it. In a moment I was asleep ; and from that time the experiment, often repeated, has scarcely ever failed. Not seldom the result is sudden as the fall of a curtain, and seems like a charm. A friend to whom I have con. fided my little discovery tells me that, without sny preliminary theorising about the lobes of the brain, she had hit upon the same plan to produce sleep, and had found it wonderfully efficacious. [The writer of the above is ‘ F. P. C.’ the initials being those of a well-known lady, Miss France* Power Cobbe.—Ed.] -