UNWHOLESOME SLEEP.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VI, Issue 30, 26 July 1890, Page 8

UNWHOLESOME SLEEP.

Not always is sleep ‘ tired nature’s sweet restorer.’ Sometimes, instead of a balm, it brings a bugbear in the shape of the nightmare. Man is a wonderful piece of work, but his machinery may be thrown out of gear and set a-whizzing by so slight a thing as a late supper. An indigestible Welsh rarebit at eleven P.M. may result in a big, suffocating black dog across his chest at one o’clock in the morning;: an overplus of loaf-pastry, which his gastric juices cannot conveniently assimilate, may precipitate him from a precipice in dreamland into a bottomless abyss ; or a surfeit of pate de foie gras send him to a Morphean gallows, there to endure all the tortures of actual strangulation. This sort of thing, by the way, is only one remove from apoplexy, and the incubus-ridden victim of inordinate and untimely self-indulgence is likely enough to be at last bestridden in, his sleep by a nightmare too strong for his vitality—even Death.

The term nightmare is supposed to have been derived from Mara, the name of a demon which, according to theScandinavian mythology, pounced upon men in their sleep and held the will in thraldom. The old Saxons called the distemper Elf-si-denne, or elf-squatting. With the doctors, who are nothing if not classical, it is Ephialities, from a mythic giant of that name who undeitook to climb to heaven, but, missing his foothold, tumbled into the fathomless depths. Most of us have probably been convulsed in our sleep with the same sort of horror which the trippedup Titan is fabled to have experienced during his ‘ lofty fall ’ from the celestial battlements.

In our boyish days, or rather nights, we were frequently pitched headlong from the tops of sky-cleaving mountains,, thrown over staircases and into wells from which the bottoms had dropped out; to say nothing of falling, led and all, through trap-doors in the floor into illimitable chaos ; or being caught up by the hair into the realms of ether and there kept dangling and kicking like a jumping-jack, without any apparent prospect of rescue. Well do we remember the start of terror with which we awoke on such occasions, and the deep-drawn sighs of relief which followed the consciousness of safety. It is doubtful whether any waking' agony surpasses the torment that has been endured in dreams.

There can be little doubt that many of the dark ages were Maras begotten of indigestion. Your Saxon gormandizer, who sometimes feasted far into the night on boar’sflesh and venison pasty, washing it down with frothy mead, must have gone to bed with his stomach in a nice condition. No wonder that of the inteinal fei mentation, caused by such stuffing and swilling, hobgoblins and hippogrifls in endless variety were born. The surest way to avoid the nightmare, and procure that sound, healthful repose, with which each day’s life should be “ rounded off,” is to live temperately, regularly and honestly. Ay, honestly, for a troubled conscience, as well' as an overladen diaphram, may engender evil dreams.