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Slumber's friends

Bharat Savur

Sleepless in Seattle, Silchar, Seoul ...? Check out your `psychotechniques' -- ``behaviour in motion''. You toss and turn, say sleep-specialists, because you are in `road-rage mode' -- a higher-than-average body temperature, above-normal blood vessel con strictions per minute -- more set to overtake old-slowcoach-ahead in rush-hour traffic than to relax.

But you cannot rush slumber. You must allow this artist of the silken repose to steal softly, gently over you at night and depart with silent grace at dawn. It calls not for rude, loud gestures but subtle, eloquent advances.

Come morning, stop honking and lower mental decibels, refrain from overtaking, drive at a reduced speed and allow the bliss of fellowship and goodwill to direct your thinking on life's Grand Trunk road. For, as Deepak Chopra describes, though thought be as a photon -- a `non-thing' without volume or mass in space -- as the photon influences light, so thought influences life. ``These fleeting, invisible impulses of the mind turn into concrete, locatable neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin'' -- the brain's chemicals of tranquility. On these, the road magically broadens.

Maintain your mental brakes. A mind daily bombarded with information needs stopovers: to imbibe, so that information composes into knowledge; to internalise, so that knowledge calms into wisdom. Reverie blunts the hostile edges of responses and slows dow n at intersections of relationships.

Come evening, put the brakes on planning. Even ambition should humbly await the sun to rise or sloth sets in at morn. ``Any pre-bedtime activity that stimulates the mind is bound to keep you awake,'' points out the author of A Good Night's Sleep.

Dr. Jerrold Maxmen, a firm believer in the both-ends-of-the-candle approach -- i.e. ``not only improving the quality of the sleep that we are waking up from, but also by improving the desirability of the days that we are waking to''.

The principle remains -- ``Arrange your day so that something pleasant awaits you shortly after you get up''. And carry that warm tingle of expectation to bedtime -- the prospect of curling up with a book in bed.

Here, see sentences as symbols of psychotechniques -- a bedtime reading method that includes autogenic training, self-hypnosis, systemic slowdown and progressive muscle relaxation. First, lie down in a comfortable `Raggedy Ann' way, allowing all muscles to go limp. Now read in a smooth continuous flow, neither seeking information nor solutions. Sink into the immortalised world of print where time stands still. Allow the words to walk with your eyes from left to right.

Slow down your eye movement from word... to... word. It's leisure time, you are where you want to be, free to linger over the blank spaces between words, you don't have to finish a sentence... Each line gradually melts into the next. Every punctuation ma rk signals you to further reduce your reading pace. No analysis, no resistance, just eyes inching forward. As the silence of the unspoken word cloaks your mind, you become aware of your breathing: It's deeper. Eyes, words, breath become one. Words blur, eyelids droop, head drops. Sleep descends.

For psychiatrist Dr. Jack Leedy, verse wins over valium: ``Instead of one pill, take two poems -- Wordsworth's To Sleep and Swinburne's A Ballad of Dreamland.'' ``Poetry is one of the most effective `grounding' mechanisms,'' he observes, having witnessed insomniac addicts eschew pills ``to get hooked to Hopkins, Herrick and Homer''. Analyses poetry therapist Joy Shieman, ``Poetry's metaphors project a holistic picture of a situation where shortcomings get a long lease and its prosody (word-rhythm) often reflects the pace of measured breathing.''

For those unmoved by ``cold words on paper'', Dr. Emmet Miller recommends psychotechnique tapes to bring about ``sleep-behaviour changes''. Such audio cassettes blend sophoric suggestions, idyllic scenes and music. While the taped voice speaks to the lef t brain, the music engages the right brain and the ensuing imagery (of say, lying on a sandy beach with the sun, sea, sand and the seagull's cry) relaxes and leadens the brain with a diffused glow until it chooses to snooze.

Psychotechniques are harbingers of psycho-practices and a larger, holistic philosophy. For sleeplessness indicates that there is something not quite right in our wakefulness. All thoughts affect the mind and heart. The body's primordial intelligence soak s these up as cellular effects and transmits in its wisdom this knowledge to the senses. To slow down is a technique, to awaken to its value leads to practice, to experience its effects is to be given a whole new dimension to life. And sleep is that dime nsion, according to visionaries like Richard Bach. A meditational aspect of wakefulness where we withdraw from our waking prejudices to retreat to an open, god-like sphere. The message: If you can do it in sleep, you can do it in wakefulness. It's then t hat we do away with road rage and come of age on the road.

The writer is the co-author of the book `Fitness for Life'.