Читать книгу The psychology of sleep онлайн

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But there is still another way of looking at wakefulness, when we cannot trace the cause of it. It may be the time sent to us by the Spirit for quiet thought. The ancients believed that God spoke in visions of the night. We may not always be able to sleep, but we can always lie in the arms of our Great Mother Nature. There is a real philosophy as well as devotion in the old prayer we teach our children, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” A still older form of the almost instinctive recognition of the fact that sleeping is but intrusting ourselves to the Universal love was, “He committed himself to God in sleep.” Like sleep, a wakeful night may be a growing time. It affords the quiet, the time, the seclusion to think over the meanings of things, or even to seek the cause of the wakefulness itself. For that is the first thing to do if we find ourselves wakeful; if the cause be so obscure that we cannot find it, then the best thing to do is to accept the fact.

Either we do not need the sleep we are seeking,—the reclining position being all the rest the body needs,—or else we do need the wakefulness to teach us something that we can learn or will learn in no other way. It is a time when, free from the watchful eyes of those who love us, or those who do not love us, we need not fear to look at ourselves, our motives, our relations to our fellows.