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Sufferer searches for some sleep inducers
BY Carl Heintze
That well-known chronicler of the 1920s in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald, called it "the dark night of the soul."
He lay awake around three in the morning, thinking of all those he had wronged on the day before, made a list of things undone for the day that was to come and meandered through his life without tangible result.
He was suffering from insomnia, a peculiar condition in which one wakes, usually in the early morning, for no apparent reason and which then prevents the sufferer from going back to sleep.
(Actually Fitzgerald swiped "the dark night of the soul" from St. John of the Cross, a Christian mystic of the Middle Ages, who was looking for God, but no matter.)
Insomnia is a common problem among adults, possible at most any age, but more likely to come with age. For some, it is an occasional visitors, for others a regular visitor. The wife of a friend of mine is a regular sufferer. For no apparent reason she can only sleep about three hours continuously a night, not a condition likely to bring domestic tranquillity.
There's no way to know how many Americans suffer from insomnia, but it must be a lot. Those who do tend to use a variety of sleep aids, particularly pharmaceuticals--drugs, in other words. These seem to fall into what we might call hard and soft assistance. The hard stuff is sleeping pills. These used to be barbiturates, but newer and less dangerous compounds are now available.
The soft stuff is mostly antihistamines, drugs originally marketed to ease or eliminate cold and allergy symptoms. Antihistamines also make one drowsy, but don't have as many possible side effects as stronger sleeping aids.
Either soft or hard, they tend to make one groggy the next day, sort of hung over. For those who undertake to go to sleep without drugs there aren't many things that work very well.
I speak from some experience.
You can try counting sheep. I've found this doesn't work for me, mostly because I am nonmath oriented. I count the sheep jumping over the fence up to about 25, then I lose track and have to start all over again. The effect of repetition is lost.
When I was younger I had another scheme that sometimes worked. I would try to remember the place I slept each night in combat during World War II, a time of some eight months. Because it was a vivid, even life-threatening experience, I got pretty good at it. I usually fell asleep somewhere in November or December 1945. On really difficult nights I used sometimes to go as far as February 1945, but that was not often.
However, I discovered over the years that my memory got worse and I couldn't remember every night in one month, let alone eight, so that didn't work any more. I also found that my mind tends to wander. I'm out of 1944 and 1945, and in some gray land after that, when nothing of great significance happened and I tended simply to forget.
Nor did I find, as Fitzgerald, who had alcoholic and psychiatric problems, that lying awake at night was anything like the dark night of the soul. It wasn't trying, it was just boring.
I did become impressed, however, with the amount of trivia which streamed past my mind's eye while I was awake.
Most of it wasn't good for much of anything. For instance, sometimes this thought pattern would be about the lawn sprinkling system and why it didn't work. The fact was that I didn't know why it didn't work. I had some suspicions, none of them particularly well- founded, but, good or bad, I found I turned them over in my mind, anyway.
The real way to check them out would have been to get up and look at the lawn plumbing, but it was the middle of the night, it was cold, the bed felt warm and comfortable, and I didn't want my wife to find me prowling around in the dark with a pipe wrench and a flashlight.
So, I wandered off into a search of the first name of someone in my high school class whom I had not seen in 50 years. There was no reason why I should remember his name. The chances were that I was never going to see him again, but it was a challenge, good for about a half-hour of meandering about in the darkness and insomnia.
Finally, it dawned on me that I could look it up in my high school annual. But where was it? I then tried to remember. Probably somewhere in the bookcase. I thought about getting up to look for it, but the same set of constraints: the nice warm bed, my sleeping wife, the lack of light, no clue as to where to begin to look and so on, all intervened.
And that's the last thing I remember until I woke up the next morning.
So my advice to you insomniacs is not to think about trying to get back to sleep. Think of anything else and you'll sleep like a baby.
Or, if that doesn't work, try a glass of milk and a graham cracker. That works just as well and it tastes good, too.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
