estless until he has somehow
disillusioned us by stating the exact number of hours and minutes
during which he was able to lose himself in slumber.

We must not ridicule the man who doesn't sleep. We are all very much
alike. If any one of us happens to lie awake for a night or two, he is
likely to get into a panic, and if the spell should last a week, he
begins looking up steamship agents and talking of voyages to Southern
seas. The fact is that most people are dreadfully afraid of insomnia.
Knowing the effects of a few nights of enforced wakefulness, and
having had a little experience with the fagged feeling after a
restless night, they believe themselves only logical when they fall
into a panic over the prospect of persistent insomnia.

=Two Kinds of Wakefulness.= As a matter of fact, insomnia is a phantom
peril. There is not the slightest danger from lying awake nights,
provided one is not kept awake by some irritating physical stimulus.
All fear of insomnia is based on ignorance of the difference between
enforced wakefulness and deliberate wakefulness, or insomnia. The man
who has acquired the habit may stay awake almost indefinitely without
appreciable harm, but the one who is kept awake for a week by a pain,
by a chemical poison from infection, or by the necessity for staying
up on his job, may easily be in a state of exhaustion. Even in cases
of prolonged pain or over-exertion, the body tends to maintain its
equilibrium by hastening its rate of repair and by falling asleep
before the danger point is reached. It is almost impossible to impair
permanently the tissue of the brain except in the presence of a
chemical irritant. In case of infection we often have to give medicine
to neutralize the effect of the poison or to resort to narcotics which
make the brain cells less susceptible to irritation. But nervous
insomnia is another story.

A HARMLESS HABIT

=Long-Lived Insomniacs.= A man of my acquaintance once said in all
seriousness and with evident alarm: "I am following in the footsteps
of my mother. She lived to be seventy years old and she had insomnia
all her life." If this man had been preaching a sermon on the
harmlessness of chronic insomnia, he could not have chosen a better
text, but he seemed just as much concerned about himself as if his
mother had died from the effects of three months' wakefulness. People
can live healthy lives during twenty or thirty years of insomnia
because chronic insomnia is