... will sometimes leap,
from hiding-places ten years deep.
To share a bedroom with one of these fellows is to lose one’s faith in human nature, even after the most eventful day, there is no comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the balance of the day’s pleasure and pain. The sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all snore abominably!
The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in there ineffectuality. In Lavengro(or is it Romany Rye?) there is an impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of Wordsworth’s poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow’s malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.
Discussing the question, some time ago, with an old friend, she gave me her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain. Her favorite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I tried- though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine-but it was of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my friend T. and what he said , and what I said, and I wondered how T. was faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or the Rochy Mountains-but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth describes in Prometheus Unbound, that vague region filled with Dreams and the light imaginings of men, is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall. And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it.
But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for re-reading(not for the first, and, please Heaven! Not the last time) Lamb’s letters, I came upon the following, in a note to Southey; “But there is a man in my office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities! ...When I can’t sleep o’ nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon a given subjects, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer...” There is promise in this, and we all have our Mr. H.’s, whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts upon us like a dose of laudanum. This very night I will dismiss such trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore.
※本文作者：未知※