Sometimes we are kept awake by pain.
Some persons suffer pain that has no remission, except the temporary deadness that comes from nervous exhaustion and sleep.
But sometimes the hardest torture is the thought that the pain is unnecessary or useless.
I went once to visit a friend, whom I found suffering from the worst abscesses on the back of the neck that I ever saw, so frightful that the sight of them made me, who am a strong man, feel faint.
I asked sympathetically what was the matter.
" Oh," he said, " I'm getting some experience.
A consciousness that such pain was useful helped to make the agony less unendurable.
In fact, though he did not see it all then, he was getting just what he and those about him needed.
He was a vigorous man, who took to rural work in a place where the food was excellent, he was naturally gluttonous and overate, hence the boils.
This he learned; And also how to bear pain.
The proper management of our own bodies is even more essential to our happiness and wellbeing than the proper management of the land, and I hope that this book will be no less welcome to students and physicians than to the great mass who for lack of knowledge or of attention do not wholly avail themselves of the freely offered gift of sleep.
This information may be useful to many who find it difficult to harmonize their lives with their surroundings.
To teach we must analyze and comprehend our own action and its motives: for being able to do a thing well is far different from being able to teach it.
In order to teach anything we must know how we do it and why others cannot do it.
The best sleep involves more than a normal body; it involves healthy thought and the application to our daily lives of the moral principles laid down by our great spiritual teachers.
The cure of sleeplessness has been left largely to the physician, who is not always a specialist on that subject and who will welcome a treatise that will enable his patient to co-operate with his restorative measures.