Many people are worried over the fact that their sleep is irregular, that is, that they sleep six hours one night and ten the next night and possibly only four hours the third night.
This is probably as it should be. Our requirements vary with varying conditions. After eating salt fish one may need several glasses of water to slake one’s thirst, while one may not need to drink a drop of any liquid after partaking of juicy fruit.
One should also dismiss as an idle superstition the dictum according to which sleep before midnight is more beneficial than sleep after midnight. Hundreds of newspapermen, watchmen, policemen, printers, railroadmen, etc., work nights and sleep in the day time and do not contribute more heavily than other professions to the ranks of the mentally deranged.
Older people, whose urges are at low ebb and do not require the satisfaction vouchsafed by dream life should become reconciled to the fact that they need few hours sleep; they should refrain from taking narcotics and go to bed later than they do, so as not to “lay awake all night,” which generally means that after dozing an hour or two in an armchair and retiring at ten they wake up normally about one or two in the morning.
Sleep is important in health but even more so in mental disturbances. The solution for the complicated problems of the neurotic’s life depends upon the wealth of facts contained in the unconscious rising freely to the surface in dreams and relieving the uncertainty. The tragedy is that except in cases of sleeping sickness, the neurotic who needs more sleep than the healthy subject, generally gets much less.
The neurotic should sleep preferably at night and avoid day sleep. This for two reasons. He should keep in touch with reality when reality is active and obvious, as during the day. With the falling of the shadows, reality acquires a tinge of indefiniteness which lends itself to many misinterpretations and to fancies of the morbid type.
Sleeplessness in the ghostly hours of the night is a poison for the neurotic, for everything at such times is exaggerated, distorted and the slightest worry is transformed into a terrible danger. Many children could be spared fits of “night terrors” if they were not forced to go to bed very early, after which they are likely to wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented and fearful.
It has been said that insomnia was the cause of insanity and experiments such as those made at the University of Iowa show that men kept awake for a prolonged period of time begin to have delusions and hallucinations similar to those of dementia praecox. But it must be remembered that the men who submitted to those experiments were not allowed to “rest.”
The contrary proposition, that is, that insomnia is induced by insanity is more plausible psychologically.
And indeed every psychiatrist has made the observation that some insane people sleep very little, so little in fact that such protracted periods of sleeplessness would kill the average normal person. That observation has been confirmed by Bleuler, who as the head of the Zurich psychiatric clinic and one of the most tireless psychological experimenters in the world, is in a position to speak with authority.