Low Tech Insomnia Cure

Insomnia can be cured with the use of an electric oil burning lamp heating household salt in water. (A candle heated oil burning lamp is not recommended for safety reasons.) The burner should be switched on in the bedroom half an hour before bedtime. The sleep that is attained is solid and refreshing. I got the idea one sleepless night. I remembered having a conversation with a World War 1 sailor. I had asked him what the point of having a night shift during a battle was when no one could sleep due to the noise. He replied that he put his dirty socks under his pillow at night and this somehow made him sleep better. I thought of the possible ingredients of a dirty sock that could keep him sleep in battle and decided to experiment with salt first. I was soon asleep, and for a long time. I have found that on the first night one is asleep for a long time as you are catching up on lack of sleep. Several more nights of breathing in artificial sea air and sleep patterns begin to return to normal, and a loud alarm clock is recommended.

This explains why people sleep sounder at the coast when the wind is blowing in from the sea.

In New Scientist No2696 Emma Young in 'Sleep Well, Stay Sane' investigates the idea that insanity could be caused by poor sleep patterns rather than insanity causing poor sleep patterns. The evidence is around that turns conventional wisdom of psychiatrists on their heads. She says: "The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients."

The article goes on to say that Doctors studying psychiatric disorders noticed long ago that erratic sleep was somehow connected. Adults with depression, for instance, are five times as likely as the average person to have difficulty breathing when asleep, while between a quarter and a half of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from sleep complaints.

The evidence for poor sleep being the cause of mental illness goes back a long way. In 1987 Patricia Chang and colleagues at John Hopkins University in Baltimore reported a study of 1053 male medical students and studied them for 34 years after graduation. Those that reported suffering from insomnia were twice as likely to develop depression as those with no trouble sleeping. Likewise, there are four categories of severity of sleep apnoea, and

Paul Peppard and his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that each increase in a person's category doubled their chances of getting depression. Although my experiment numbers are small, I concur with Emma Young and find that both mental illness can be cured, and also the amount of sleep that sleep apnoea suffers receive is improved with this method.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, about 40 million people in the United States suffer from chronic long-term sleep disorders each year and an additional 20 million people experience occasional sleep problems. This is a staggering total of 19.75% of the population and significant inroads into this figure can be made with a simple invention.

I have two pages on alternatives to this Insomnia Cure, namely The Kadir-Buxton Method, and the British Space Administration