EXERCISE YOUR IMAGINATION

The audible suggestions of psychologists have broken the nervous habit of wakefulness and proved a boon to thousands troubled with insomnia. Many have practiced autosuggestion with the same good results. That is, after lying down they have held in their minds thoughts like the following:

My body is now entirely relaxed and I am going to sleep. I am quiet. My mind is passive and drowsy. I will soon be fast asleep and I will sleep restfully until morning.

But, occasionally, the very effort to hold such thoughts defeats the purpose and keeps one awake. One woman tried to “autosuggest” herself asleep. She relaxed hopefully, and repeated her formula over and over, but it didn’t work. She tried it for several nights, growing more restless and impatient, and more skeptical of her own powers, each night.

It seemed to her that she was two persons, one lying sensibly in bed, trying to realize that she could and would sleep, and one perched on the foot-board looking on and sneeringly repeatedly, “You can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

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One day she saw in a magazine a picture of a patient being treated. An elderly man was sitting back most restfully in a chair, and behind the chair, bending slightly over the patient in an attitude suggesting power, assurance, and authority, stood the therapist who was treating him.

When she thought of the picture after retiring, she felt very sure that if she were in that study and if that therapist were bending over her with the same attitude of calm assurance and strength, and were telling her to go to sleep, she would obey. Then she decided to “play” that she was being treated. She imagined herself in that pictured room, relaxing in that comfortable chair. She imagined further that a quiet voice, with great reserve and power, was saying words similar to these which follow, and in ten minutes she was sound asleep and slept all night.

“There is no reason why you should not go to sleep. You can sleep as well as anybody else. You are growing very quiet already. You are growing sleepy. You are going fast asleep. You are sleeping, sleeping. Sleep!”

She reasoned then, that if she had actually put herself to sleep through imagining such a scene, she had the power to do it without such imagining. She tried it and failed. She needed some such aid as her imaginary guide afforded her, to enable her to let

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go of her self-consciousness. At first when she tried to put herself to sleep by direct suggestions, she doubted her words and failed, but she had faith in her imaginary guide. The activity of the imagination occupied her mind in the creative work of forming the guide, the place, and the state of relaxation, drew the consciousness into a subconscious state, and allowed the much-used outer mind to subside. After a while, however, she gained the ability to put herself to sleep without this aid.

There are various ways that this same result may be accomplished by use of the imagination. Another method is to imagine oneself back in the pleasant scenes of childhood. With a little practice, the pictures hidden in memory can be entered into and will become so absorbing that present things will be forgotten; one will wander through bright childhood scenes all through the night, and wake refreshed from partaking of the joy of happy recollections.

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