Читать книгу The psychology of sleep онлайн

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When yellow fever was one of the “mysterious dispensations of Providence,” men of science fought only its symptoms, with very indifferent success. The people in the district where the fever broke out were panic-stricken; those who could fled from the place; those who were compelled to remain went about in fear of their lives. Now that we believe that the bite of an infected mosquito is the once “mysterious dispensation,” we no longer allow the infection to spread. Fear and unreason might have continued to treat outbreaks and epidemics of yellow fever for centuries to come without lasting advantage to the plague-ridden spots, but the knowledge of what to do and how to do it has made yellow fever a preventable evil. It has no terrors for an intelligent community.

So with wakefulness. If we find ourselves wakeful when we should be sleeping, the first thing to do is to find the reason.

Sometimes we cause our own sleeplessness unsuspectingly, but none the less deliberately, by the false requirements that we lay upon ourselves. People often say, “I could not go to sleep in a room like that.” If there is time and opportunity to put the room in order, why do it; but, if not, we can resolve, as the boys say, to “forget it.” Many a woman frets and disturbs herself continually by putting things in what she considers order, which things are no better for being rearranged and which generally cannot stay in order—endless pushing in of chairs and placing pamphlets or books with the little ones on top and the big ones at the bottom; a constant and wearisome struggle to keep all the shades in the house in a line. The labor of Sisyphus, who had forever to roll a great stone up a sand hill, would be restful compared with that. I knew a man once who would be entirely upset, and would upset all the people about him, if his stockings that came from the wash were not placed below those in the drawer so that they would surely be used in rotation.