Other sources in this era expound on the home-based use of experimental chemicals and herbs, and in the same breath acknowledge the nature of the substances as “likely to do as much injury in the one case as in the other. He would be working on his own body, and hence much more to his disadvantage than if he were endeavoring to compute the orbits of comets or the periods of the rotation of the moons of Jupiter.”173 Herein the author, an ex—“medical officer of the army,” deferentially conjectures174 upon the benefits of, among others, sulphonal (“In proper doses, it produces sound and refreshing sleep, but it requires from two to four hours to act… intense cardiac weakness, stupor, and even convulsions have been induced by its use”), chloralamid (“As soon as the people get hold of it we shall surely have an experience of its effects very different from that which we now possess”), and chloral (“The sleep produced by choral is natural in almost every respect… a large quantity acts as a poison to the heart, paralyzing this organ and therefore causing death”). Here again, the door to death, in parallel halls: side by side in absent light — which, for some, in jest or measure, might become, in worse lights, a cure itself. In his introduction to an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1956, Hitchcock announces he’s just “come into possession” of a cure. “It comes in capsule form,” he says, arranging a row of five bullets nose-up on his desk. “For best results, they must be taken internally.” Studies linking sleeplessness to self-murder in this way have found those too long awake as much as 2.6 times more likely to turn to forever wanting out.175
By the 1960s, experimentation with hypnotic suggestion rises to popularity with regular reports of strong results, particularly as an alternative where sleep medicine had failed—in repetition image, in coagulation of the mind’s wanting to be confined. As well, muscle relaxation training, systematic desensitization to aggravating stimuli, classical conditioning via metronome and other triggers, biofeedback, electrosleep (induction of low electric current into the resting body), placebo attribution (pills that have simply been suggested to cause calm), and even correcting a sleeper’s expectations (relieving stress by devaluing routine) have all been studied and marked as potentially beneficial methods of therapy, despite their connotations.176 Other studies suggest that results come only from cures intentionally paradoxical — i.e., telling patients that the sleeplessness is a side effect of their trying, and therefore, to nod off, simply try not to — whereas straightforward, analytical methods further the problem or have no effect — i.e., having patients focus on and identify the thoughts that keep them up, thereby subverting the brain by turning it against its own weight, instead of crawling further in.177
]
]
]
Particularly in our current realm of increasing self-diagnosis and online problem solving, the menu of ways to learn to sleep could stuff a head. Online, each question often comes with fifty answers, and further questions often veer out of each of these. Our information has its own information, which begets information. Inside the shells, if not by nature, we must find a way to sleep, to learn to override the signal with our own nowhere. Googling sleep as of today returns 1.42 trillion results. Googling cure insomnia cuts the set down to just under two million. Often the resulting copy for these vendors seems written by someone hypnotized or already deep asleep themselves:
The interesting thing about sleeping pills is the placebo effect. .. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I put myself into a state of trance, and imagine that I am taking a sleeping pill. I am usually asleep in a few minutes. Even though my conscious mind knows that this was not real, my subconscious mind does not know and this is the important part. THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND DOES NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REAL AND AN IMAGINED EVENT.178
Other sites offer webcopy spellspeak, mistyped modern babble relics of the home remedy, likely generated by a head behind a desk to make a couple bucks, or out of boredom. Try actively accommodating this:
Wrap handfuls of uncooked oats and dried camomile flowers, and a pinch of mandrake in a square of cheesecloth and filter a hot bath through it. Light some Egyptian kyphi incense and bathe while deeply breathing the aromas. In bed, envisage yourself in a field of camomile. .. Think of lying down in the fragrant daisies, lulled to sleep by their fresh, sweet smell. Beneath the ground, the underworld; and above, in the blue sky, Witches and rainbow-hued elementals fly by on unimaginable missions. You lie drowsing in the fragrant flowers, following one of the passers-by, then another, tracing their patterns in the ether and following to the tunnel leading to the deep blue yonder.179
Or:
For a full-blown case of insomnia, put a head of lettuce into a blender and reduce it to a liquid. Gently rub this on your forehead and temples for a few minutes before going to bed. If you still can’t sleep, liquefy another head of lettuce the next night, but drink it this time.180
As sorry as these are, you can believe there are those who’ve tried it — as in the grips of the shit you might believe in any idea as a potential out, or on a long night concede the doubt on the off chance it might somehow do the job.
What becomes even more confounding in the online forums of these methods is the constant sales pitch sunk into the jargon — if not simply the jargon in and of itself, being a commodity of canned language and expected soundtrack. In the margins of the search results, Google offers columns of paid ads: “Waking up at 2AM? Highly Effective. 100 % Guarantee, Get the Rest You Deserve, Phone Hypnosis or Online (Only $50.00 until Nov. 30th receive custom CD or MP3).” Here are endless options, copies of copies. While you are looking here, see also here. Listen when I’m talking. Know this. Eat this. Over here. Even would-be film clips and audio installments of the actual hypnosis bookend their sleep-made message with more dot-com blurbing and copy talk. Today a YouTube video titled “Hypnosis for sleep and relaxation”181 comes with not only the inlaid ads of the corporate sponsor YouTube (again owned by Google), but also the semi-opaque overlays that now adorn the bottom of any video you watch (they can be can be x-ed out if you click them, though be careful not to click the ad itself), as well as further comment ads the video’s creators have inserted to supplement with extra information the text ads that make up the introduction to the video itself, an elucidation of the elucidation, all set up before you get to the meat that’s supposed to help you go to sleep. Beyond all of that, on the same page, is the video’s description message, which contains more URLs and jargons, in addition to codes you can use to share the page, and below that, links to other videos by the same creator and those of a like interest (this particular clip goes to a whole palette of videos with words like relaxation, meditation, sleep now, hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis, on and on). The YouTube ads even have little placards beneath them—“Advertisement,” in small gray font — in case you somehow didn’t realize, and really need to know. And there beneath the label of the ad, another ad.