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THE 'PLIMSOLL LINE' OF SLEEP: A life without sleeping, or a life where the polarity of being awake and being asleep has broken down, would also amount, if endurable for any length of time, to a life without waking, i.e. to a sort of death-in-life, or perpetual consciousness of external reality which, in its unrelenting intensity, would inevitably prove so intolerable as to drive one either to suicide or, failing that, an asylum. But a life with its natural quota of sleep is, by comparison, a fortunate life - indeed, one doesn't realize just how fortunate until one has regularly had experience of insomnia! For whether or not we realize it, sleep is the greatest medicine we possess.

Consequently there is some truth in the notion that a man who lives well also sleeps well. One might contend, in this context, that sleep becomes a kind of 'Plimsoll line' of correct living, a guideline by which one can establish an accurate criterion as to whether one is living naturally or unnaturally, agreeably or disagreeably, sensibly or foolishly. I mean if, as is sometimes the case, we are not sleeping as well as we believe we should, might it not be an indication from our subconscious mind that we are living against the grain, as it were, by either taking too much social and/or occupational responsibility upon ourselves or, conversely, not taking enough?

Hence our insomnia could be interpreted as both a warning and a punishment, a method employed by nature to stir us into taking a remedial course of action. In which case it should be evident that regular use of sleeping pills is not the remedial course of action we should take. For rather than rectifying the situation as it ought to be rectified, i.e. through action establishing a more healthy and tolerable mode of life, they usually further complicate it by imposing an artificial sleep upon us which, by interfering with the subconscious, hardly compensates us for natural sleep.

Thus we are running away from ourselves at the very moment when we ought to be facing-up to and eventually overcoming our personal difficulties, when instead of acting like a man who, because of various problems in his life, drinks himself into alcoholism (and thereby makes matters worse for himself), we should be noting the instructions which emanate from our subconscious mind and subsequently set about doing whatever we can to obey them, if for no other reason than our own good. For anything else is inherently perverse and, as such, it can only aggravate the problem, to increase rather than decrease our afflictions.