I. CURED BY SUGGESTION ALONE
A.—Waking Suggestion
1. The Emmanuel Clinic in Boston reports the case of a distinguished lawyer who after nine months of insomnia came to Emmanuel Church for counsel. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His habit was to take his work and worries every night to bed with him. He was advised to submit to the rest cure under a good neurologist. He replied that, with important cases coming up at once for trial, rest was impossible. In fact, he could at most spend a few hours in Boston. The causes of insomnia were then explained to him. Suggestions were given looking toward self-help. The importance of cheerful and uplifting thoughts was emphasised. He went away an hour later to report in a few weeks that he was entirely cured and had not felt so well since he was a boy.
2. Dubois (p. 340) speaks of a physician twenty-three years of age who had suffered for nine months from persistent insomnia. By bromides, bathing, travel, and the cessation of all work, he had obtained only transient results. Dubois drew his attention to the psychic causes of insomnia, counselled the immediate abandonment both of the treatment he had been giving himself and of all apprehension of insomnia. In a few days sleep returned, the convalescent resumed his customary duties, and was soon completely well again.
B.—Profound Suggestion
Forel (p. 252) describes the case of a working-girl who suffered for a year and a half from extreme sleeplessness. All means for her relief failed. Forel induced profound suggestion, let her sleep about an hour every day while she was still in his clinic room, and after three weeks discharged her completely cured and able regularly to sleep nine hours out of every twenty-four.
2. CURED BY FAITH REINFORCED BY SUGGESTION
A.—Inability to go to sleep on going to bed
A clergyman forty years of age had inherited a tendency to sleeplessness. Even as a child it was not uncommon for him to lie awake an hour or two after getting into bed. As he passed into his teens the presence of his brother or a boy friend in the same bed would invariably keep him wide awake the whole night through. At college the unusual strain of extra work or of examinations was likely to drive sleep entirely away, and only with the help of bromides at special seasons was he able to get through his studies and take his place at last among the honour men.
His first years out of college were spent in graduate study and educational work, and were made miserable by the gradual increase of insomnia, which shut him out of many social pleasures and impaired his efficiency.