CURES FOR INSOMNIA.
The following correspondence, clearly intended for the Editor of The Daily Ailment, has found its way into our letter-box. Another example of post-office inefficiency.
Sir,—As a regular reader of your valuable journal I am always deeply interested in the views of your readers as expressed in its columns. The recent letters on the cure of insomnia have interested me particularly. Although I have read your paper for many years, always eaten standard bread, study most diligently each morning my lesson on Government wobble and waste, grow sweet peas, keep fowls, take my holidays early (in Thanet) and read the feuilleton, in short perform all the duties of an enthusiastic loyal Englishman, I cannot sleep. Yesterday I decided to try the remedies suggested by your readers.
After inviting sleep with "a dish of boiled onions" I found that I must go to bed "without having eaten anything for five hours or so." This meant sitting up very late, but I found the time useful for taking "deep long breaths." Meanwhile I ran through the names of my friends alphabetically and emptied the feathers from my pillow, replacing them with hops. Sometimes a hop got mixed up in a "deep long breath," which was rather pleasant.
Every few minutes I left my friends' names to say to myself, "I am terribly sleepy," or "I am falling asleep;" this was wrong, as the boiled onions had not had nearly five hours. "Relaxing all my muscles" was rather awkward, as one hand was filling the pillow with hops and the other was "holding a wet sponge," which would drip water on the sheets. Another difficulty was "wafting myself in an imaginary aeroplane" to bring about "a state of oblivion and coma," which I might perhaps have done more easily by putting the hops to another use.
I had to cut out the "recital of the Litany," partly because my friends' names had only got as far as George (Lloyd), and also because, being a Nonconformist, I don't know it. (I must learn it now the feuilleton is finishing.)
But the most annoying part of the business was to find that, after all this elaborate preparation for sleep, I was to "take a brisk walk for half-an-hour" (whatever the weather conditions). Even this did not work, for by that time the milkmen and newsboys were heralding the dawn and kept my brain too alert.
As a final effort, do you think you could produce a nightcap model of the Sandringham, or is it quite impossible for one who reads your paper to be anything but wideawake?