Читать книгу The psychology of sleep онлайн

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We must learn to connect each experience with what we know of our life up to that point and with what we think it is meant to be. This effort will often show us, or itself prove to be, the key to the “problem.” But it is only the scientific expert, one who has a perfect conception of the workings of all the parts of the frame, who can take one bone and reconstruct from it the entire structure of the extinct animal. That would be impossible for the tyro, and most of us are tyros in the science of living.

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And Sleep will not lie down but walks

Wild-eyed and cries to time.

“Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

Oscar Wilde.

The fact that we confound rest and sleep makes us regard wakefulness as an evil. We go to bed to sleep, and, if sleep does not come at once, we begin to fret and to toss and we try by every means that we know to force ourselves to sleep. We never accomplish anything that way, because it is essentially opposed to the nature of sleep. Sleep, to be refreshing, must be complete relaxation of mind and body, and that is not gained by striving. Natural sleep is merely “letting go,” which is just what so many find hard to do. The course is so simple and plain that “the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein,” but he often does err in spite of its simplicity; and sometimes, perhaps, even because of its simplicity.