Readings : The Nervous System, Part 3

Hygienic Physiology: with Special Reference to the Use of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics
by Joel Dorman Steele, Ph.D.

(Page 18 of 23)

The transition stage between the dream simple and the dream acted is witnessed in the spasmodic movements which a vivid dream produces in the limbs or person of the sleeper. The dreamer engages in a fierce struggle, and twitchings of his legs and arms indicate the feeble response of body to the promptings of mind removed from its wonted power over the frame. Even the dog, as he sleeps, apparently dreams of the chase, and gives vent to his sensations by the short, sharp bark, or sniffs the air, and starts in his slumber as if in response to the activity with which, in his dreaming, he is hurrying along after the object of pursuit....Persons have been known to swim for a considerable time in the somnambulistic state without waking at the termination of their journey; others have safely descended the shaft of a mine, while some have ascended steep cliffs, and have returned home in safety during a prolonged sleep vigil. - Dr. Andrew Wilson, F.r.s.e., What Dreams are Made of.

Sleep and Conscience. - Edward Everett Hale says: Never go to bed in any danger of being hungry. People are kept awake by hunger quite as much as by a bad conscience. Remembering that sleep is the essential force which starts the whole system, decline tea or coffee within the last six hours before going to bed. Avoid all mathematics or intricate study of any sort in the last six hours. This is the stuff dreams are made of, and hot heads, and the nuisances of waking hours. Keep your conscience clear. Remember that because the work of life is infinite, you can not do the whole of it in any limited period of time, and that therefore you may just as well leave off in one place as another.

The Art of Rising Early. - The proper time to rise is when sleep ends. Dozing should not be allowed. True sleep is the aggregate of sleeps, or is a state consisting in the sleeping or rest of all the several parts of the organism. Sometimes one and at other times another part of the body, as a whole, may be the least fatigued, and so the first to awake; or the most exhausted, and therefore the most difficult to arouse. The secret of good sleep is, the physiological conditions of rest being established, so to work and weary the several parts of the organism as to give them a proportionately equal need of rest at the same moment. To wake early, and feel ready to rise, a fair and equal start of the sleepers should be secured; and the wise self-manager should not allow a drowsy feeling of unconsciousness, or weary senses, or an exhausted muscular system, to beguile him into the folly of going to sleep again when once he has been aroused. After a few days of self-discipline, the man who resolves not to doze, that is, not to allow some sleepy part of his body to keep him in bed after his brain has once awakened, will find himself, without knowing why, an early riser.

Influence of Sunlight. - Light is an essential element in producing the grand phenomena of life, though its action is ill understood. Where there is light there is life, and any deprivation of this principle is rapidly followed by disease of the animal frame, and the destruction of the mental faculties. We have proof of this in the squalor of those whose necessities compel them to labor in places to which the blessings of sunshine never penetrate, as in our coal mines, where men having everything necessary for health, except light, exhibit a singularly unhealthy appearance. The state of fatuity and wretchedness to which those individuals have been reduced, who have been subjected for years to incarceration in dark dungeons, may be referred to the same deprivation. - Robert Hunt, Poetry of Science.

Effect of Dungeon Life. - "You can not imagine, Mr. Kennan," said a condemned revolutionist to me in Siberia, "the misery of prolonged confinement in a casemate of the fortress under what are known as dungeon conditions. My casemate was sometimes cold, generally damp, and always gloomy. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I lay there in solitude, hearing no sound save that of the high-pitched, melancholy bells of the fortress cathedral, which slowly chimed the quarter hours, and which always seemed to say: 'Here You liest - lie here still.' I had absolutely nothing to do except to pace my cell from corner to corner, and think. For a long time I used to talk to myself in a whisper; to repeat softly everything in the shape of literature that I could remember, and to compose speeches which, under certain imagined conditions, I would deliver; but I finally ceased to have energy enough to do even this, and used to sit for hours in a sort of stupor, in which, so far as I can now remember, I was not conscious of thinking at all.

Before the end of the first year, I grew so weak, mentally and physically, that I began to forget words. I knew what ideas I desired to express, but some of the words that I needed had gone from me, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I could recover them. It seemed sometimes as if my own language were a strange one to me, or one which, from long disuse, I had forgotten. I greatly feared insanity, and my apprehension was increased by the fact that two or three of my comrades in cells on the same corridor were either insane or subject to hallucinations; and I was often roused at night and thrown into a violent chill of nervous excitement by their hysterical weeping, their cries to the guard to come and take away somebody, or something which they imagined they saw, or their groans and entreaties when, in cases of violent delirium, they were strapped to their beds by the gendarmes." - George Kennan, in Russian State Prisoners, The Century, March, 1888.

The Growth And Power of Poison Habits. - In order to distinguish a poison stimulant from a harmless and nutritive substance, Nature has furnished us three infallible tests:

1. The first taste of every poison is either insipid or repulsive.

2. The persistent obtrusion of the noxious substance changes that aversion into a specific craving.

3. The more or less pleasurable excitement produced by a gratification of that craving is always followed by a depressing reaction....