a book as an alternative for sleeping pills

i was browsing through a library and came across Meditations, and as i skimmed through the first few sentences, i started nodding off. that's when i realized, this would be a great cure for insomnia. i've been using it ever since, and i've never read past page 7; it has always put me to sleep. has anyone else come across other books like this? all the benefits of sleeping pills with none of the ill side effects.

I haven't found that personally with any books, but a friend of mine had a similar experience with Twilight.

Lol, only with text books and required reading. Somewhere my brain has rewired itself for sleep rebellion. 'You can't force me to read this, I'll just put myself to sleep instead!' Very inconvenient before a test.

When this happens to me, I usually realize I haven't been getting enough sleep. Mostly with dry nonfiction or literary fiction though...

Something about The Small House at Allington keeps making me fall asleep. It isn't bad; I kind of wish I could read it. But somehow it's a yawn-inducer for sure. Maybe someday.

A sure-fire technique is to balance a hardback copy of Middlemarch in a precarious position about 4 feet above your bed head. Any sleepless tossing and turning will result in the book plummeting earthward, delivering the desired effect without delay.

Warning: possible side effects may include concussion, brain damage or death.

>7 MrAndrew:
I thought about something like that last night, after obtaining a bruise catching a falling book, and subsequently glancing at my fiction shelf and noticing how big Don Quixote is (and how much bigger it would be if not in paperback).

I used to have a book of poetry written by a woman who'd been a visiting professor at my college, and I DID use it as a "sleeping aid" of sorts. Skimming through the titles on the author's LT page, it had to be A Gilded Lapse of Time by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. (That's the kind of name you don't easily forget! How to spell it...that's something else.) Maybe now, some 14 years later, I'd fare better with it, but because the book gave me more sleep than reading enjoyment, I didn't keep it.

>3 katelisim:: same here. i had to read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in English. it wasn't until over the summer that i realized, Shakespeare actually WAS good. though it only works if i'm reading in class, because i can read reading assignments fine at home, so maybe it's only classroom-related narcolepsy.

#9, you reminded me of a series from Everyman's Library I just found out about, one of which is Poems of Sleep and Dreams. I just ordered Solitude and Poems of the Sea. These look really good and I suspect I may be ordering more....

The problem with reading a book to put yourself to sleep is when it slips out of your hands and bonks you in the face. I can't count the number of times this has happened to me to the great amusement of my spouse.

Audio books send me to sleep. No matter how good the book is or how well it is read within minutes I'm in the land of nod. And it's a lot safer way of falling asleep than reading an actual book hardback or paperback.

... and then there's falling asleep whilst reading a heavy hardback, having tried to keep your place in the book, and waking up with a severely numb thumb!

#13- I don't know if it's safer... not if you have head phones on anyway. I've woken up to near strangulation from the cords before.

> 15 Try clipping the headphone cord to your shirt front. I do this so I don't accidently pull the cord out when I fall asleep and I have never had trouble with the cord.

Interesting dilemma for those who sleep commando.

#17 Heh heh heh. Duct tape?

#13 I couldn't agree more! Fell asleep listening to a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery yesterday evening, (and this after one of those awful days at work where you're so wound up that you think you'll never get to sleep...) Magic.

#18 Heh heh heh. Duct tape?

Good Lord, not if there's chest hair involved...

>#19: Oh no, just clip it to the nearest protuberance. Much better...

Edited due to unfortunate duct tape / dog clip experiment.

#19/20 Thank you both. I've just spluttered tea over my keyboard.

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker. If the dullest person in the world deliberately set out to bore people to death, this is what he would have written.