268 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



general principles which may guide reasonable people to spend a 

 third of their life a little more pleasantly and profitably? 



"Sleeping badly" Ls like pain, for it is a danger-signal that all is 

 not well with the body; and the first problem is to find out what is 

 wrong. The answer is often humdrum — too much digestion and 

 indigestion after too late a meal; too little honest work to induce 

 a reasonable amount of fatigue; too great a strain on the liver and 

 the kidneys, which have to do with getting rid of the nitrogenous 

 waste of the body; in rarer cases over- fatigue; in some cases actual 

 pain, as in toothache and earache. To cure this minor "sleeping 

 badly", one must remov^e its cause, and that, though seldom easy, 

 is in most cases possible. 



Remediable also in some measure are the environmental artifici- 

 alities and disturbances which so often knock at the doors of the 

 senses before these have been barred by deep sleep. Sound sleep 

 asks for quiet and for darkness, as well as for a decently healthy 

 body. Yet one must not make a scapegoat of the en\dronment, for 

 there is a terrible truth in the saying: "One hears only the noises one 

 listens for." 



Bergson says somewhere that we will not fall asleep if we con- 

 tinue more interested in something else than in enjoying a rest. 

 That something else may be an intellectual problem, a hydra- 

 headed practical anxiety, a great task ahead, a deep sorrow, a 

 dread, an obsession, and so on through a long and familiar list. 

 What we must do is to allow the brain a chance to give the mind 

 a holiday for the night; but, until the doctor tells us, that holiday 

 of sice]) should not be secured by any dope. It is good business to 

 think over next day's duties, but it is bad business to do that in 

 bed; it is good for us to have an intellectual problem to chew at, 

 but we should not start our mastication when we wish to sleep. 

 All devices like counting sheep are contradictions in terms; the 

 only profitable relaxation after our head touches the pillow is 

 bodily relaxation, and perhaps an easygoing recollection of pleasant 

 pictures from the past. Best of all to be as the babe in Mother's 

 arms: hence the old phrase "in the arms of Morpheus". 



Tin: Physiology of Awakening. — Given sleep, how comes 

 waking? With the conclusion of the repair and renewal process, no 

 doubt: yet how is the actual awakening accomplished? In many 

 cases simply; as fundamentally by the needs of eliminating waste- 

 products for in simple and rural civilisations, such as that of 

 India perhaps especially, this is a first care, a practically universal 

 habit, and of course the healthiest jx)ssible. Among the manifold 

 confusions and inhibitions of our urbanised civilisation the clearing 

 of bowel-waste is apt to be delayed, as so often, till after the first 

 meal, if not even longer; but in all cases the more imperative need 



