The other day
someone mentioned on Facebook that they were having trouble getting to sleep.
They were going through the whole “lying in bed tossing and turning, thoughts
going around in circles” thing.
My suggestion
was this:
Before going
to bed, tell yourself a story. It doesn’t have to be a long story, and it
doesn’t have to be a great one. But it should have one thing: a satisfying
resolution. You can write the story out, or speak it to yourself, that doesn’t
matter. And it can be a story about pretty much anything, but it’s best if it’s
not a story about you (because then
the temptation will be to narrate whatever’s bothering you right now and may be
the cause of your insomnia, which probably won’t help).
What I do is
tell myself a traditional-style tale. “There once was a boy who set out to find
the princess of the moon, for he heard she was very beautiful…” That sort of
thing. I don’t have a plot in mind when I start. I just let the story unfold,
out of all the traditional elements I’ve absorbed from other stories all my
life. Encounters, mishaps, magical objects, threats … I don’t worry about
whether it’s a good story that anyone
else would want to hear. I just tell it, with one idea in mind: that eventually
it will have to resolve into a satisfying ending.
If you’re not
a writer or someone who tells stories, you’re probably thinking there’s no way
you can do this. Actually, in my view, we’ve all got Story deep within us.
We’re all storytellers. When we were little someone told us stories, and we continue
to watch countless stories unfold on TV and in movies and books all our lives.
If you
honestly don’t think you can tell yourself a story, or you’re just too tired to
try at the end of the day, then trying reading a traditional tale (out loud is
best) or watching a show with a satisfying resolution. Or you could even ask someone else to tell you a story.
The reasoning
behind this insomnia cure (which has worked for me many times) is that the mind
craves stories, and it craves resolution. Usually the reason we can’t get to
sleep is that we feel there’s still something unfinished, something we haven’t
completed, even if sometimes we don’t consciously acknowledge what that
unfinished thing is. Instead of lying there ruminating over the day past and
the day to come, give your mind the satisfaction of a story that has an ending.
This is why
little kids beg for a story at the end of the day. They want to be taken on a
journey from somewhere to somewhere.
At the end of a rich, chaotic, busy day of being a kid, full of the usual
random bombardment of experience and sensation, they want the world to fall
into a neat orderly pattern that wraps it all up. And adults are really no
different.
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