Recently, my daughter, who works as a nurse, came to visit us from Dallas. She talked about her work with patients. Her work is intense, there are many emergency calls, she has to be on duty for a long time. Their department deals with victims of car accidents, and in Dallas expect them any minute.
The mother asked how she manages to fall asleep after an exhausting shift. “Oh, it’s very simple,” Roxanne replied. — I have a watch with a luminous dial. I know that if after ten minutes I can still make out the clock face, I will get up and go down and up the stairs from the bedroom to the living room 20 times. I am generally a lazy person and I have never had to run up the stairs 20 times. But I know for sure that if after 10 minutes I am still awake and can read the numbers on the clock, I will definitely get out of bed and run up and down the stairs 20 times.”
I have an article about a man who lost his wife. He lived with his widower son. They managed the household themselves and managed the affairs of their real estate office together. Suddenly it occurred to them to share household duties.
Finally, the old man came to me and said: “I can’t close my eyes all night, I keep tossing and turning from side to side and trying to sleep. I sleep at most two hours. I fall asleep somewhere at five in the morning, and wake up at seven.”
“Good,” I said. Let’s take care of your insomnia. Do everything as I say. You say that you shared household chores with your son. How did you share them? He replied: “The son does what he likes, and I do what I like.” “What do you hate doing the most? I asked. “Scrub the floors. We have good hardwood floors, I love when they shine. I am ready to do all the work for myself and for my son, as long as he rubs the floors. I can’t stand this job myself.»
“Understood,” I said. “I have a cure for you. You just have to sleep for eight hours. Survive the loss of eight hours of sleep?” “I’ve lost so much of this sleep in a year that I can easily withstand the extra eight hours,” the old man replied.
I advised: “When you get home tonight, buy a jar of mastic and a special rag for degreasing and polish the floor all night. Finish by the time you usually get up in the morning. Then go about your normal day job. This will give you two hours of sleep. The next night, start rubbing when everyone goes to bed. Rub all night until it’s time to go to the office. I’ve lost four hours of sleep now. The next night, continue rubbing — and another two hours of sleep is gone.
On the fourth night, before starting to polish the floor, the old man said to his son: «I think I’ll sit down for a minute, let my eyes rest.» He woke up at seven o’clock the next morning.
Now he has a jar of mastic and a rag for rubbing on his dressing table. I told him: “You have a watch with a luminous dial, if you don’t fall asleep in fifteen minutes, get up and scrub the floor.” Since then, he sleeps like a groundhog, he has not missed a single night.
One day a doctor came to see me and said, “To graduate from college, I had to study and work. Didn’t get much sleep. Studying at the medical institute was also not easy. Even before graduation, I got married and had children. I had to pay for my studies and support my family, so there was very little time for sleep. Since then, I go to bed at 10.30 pm. I turn around endlessly, look at the clock in the hope that the morning has already come, but it still doesn’t exist. Somewhere in the morning, at five o’clock, I fall asleep, and at seven I already have to get up and go to work. You know, when I was still at the institute, I made a vow to myself to read all of Dickens, all of Walter Scott, Dostoevsky, I really love literature. But there was no time for this. All I know is to toss and turn from side to side until five in the morning.
“You want to sleep well, I understand,” I remarked. “And you still regret that you never read Dickens. So buy yourself a collection of Dickens’ works.»
Tell me how your house is set up. Do you have a fireplace and a shelf above it?” He replied that there is. «Perfectly! Then take a table lamp, put it on the mantelpiece, put a volume of Dickens next to it, stand by the fireplace and read at your pleasure from 10.30 pm to five in the morning. This is how you fulfill your long-standing literary dream.”
After some time, my doctor came to me and asked: “Can I read Dickens while sitting?” “Of course,” I replied. Soon he appears again.
“I had complications with reading Dickens. I sit down and before I can even read one page, I fall asleep. I wake up only in the morning, and from a sitting posture my whole body is numb.”
“All right,” I said, “get a watch with a luminous dial and if 15 minutes after you got into bed you can still read the numbers on the clock, get up, stand by the fireplace and read Dickens. And since you have already read some of Dickens, you will be able to find another time to get to know him in full. The Doctor has read all of Dickens, Scott, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. He now recalls with horror his readings standing by the mantelpiece. It’s better to sleep.