The self help to sleep book, which has sold over a million copies in its first week since publication.
Ever since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s 1936 self-help book, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ – one of the best-selling books of all time – self-appointed influencers, lifestyle coaches, and gurus, have used the concept of ‘self-help’ to ‘help-themselves’ to great wealth and success by doing nothing more than stating the bleeding obvious.
For example, the big secret in Carnegie’s book is… if you wish to become popular… wait for it… be nice and show a genuine interest in other people.
And?… Is that it? No, surely, it can’t be! For it is not other people whose characters are in question here… it is our own. It may well be that the people we choose to associate with are interesting, intellectual, or entertaining, but that doesn’t stop us from remaining dull, uninspiring halfwits, does it? There must be more to it than that.
Well, according to the success of a new book called ‘How to sleep well’, by Canadian sleep expert Dr Honeydew Snuggles, there is not. Self help, it turns out, is easier than we previously thought. Which sits at the top of the best-seller list, is, according to reviews, a revolutionary aid in the treatment of insomnia (or to give it its clinical name, ‘tossing and turning all night, pointlessly and repeatedly thinking about the things that upset you the most.’)
Woke reporting
Being someone who has on occasion woken up three or four hours earlier than is ideal, I decided to buy a copy of the book and read it on the train to work. Here’s what happened…
For once, I managed to get a seat on the 7.10 from Beccles. It’s a good hour and forty minutes into Derby Road so I knew I could get right into the book. Normally, I would offer my seat to an old lady, a cripple, or a fit younger woman, just to impress her, but I decided that today I would be a selfish, inconsiderate bastard and just stay seated regardless of anyone who might appear in front of me in greater need than myself. I settled down into my seat, turned up the collar on my overcoat, put on my reading glasses (+3, £2.99 from B&M ), and began to read…
Another bloody sleepless night
After an overlong preface minutely detailing her family tree, education, umpteen qualifications, and a never-ending list of celebrity endorsers, Honeydew finally begins chapter one with a journey into the mind of a 37-year-old, menstruating insomniac. Okay.
As I read on, the repetitive rocking motion of the train, coupled with the fact that I had had very little sleep the previous night, began to make me drowsy. I could feel my eyes starting to close and I knew I was in trouble after I realized I’d read the same sentence five times. Soon, I was heading the imaginary football. I must have done that four or five times.
I was struggling to stay awake but conscious of not wanting to fall asleep and allow my nodding head to drop onto the shoulder of the person next to me. Nor did I want to become unconscious, as this would have caused my head to slump forwards, my face to gurn, and my mouth to dribble saliva over the floor of the train like a freshly dumped corpse.
Battling my wooziness, I forced myself to read on, so I gently pinched my forehead a few times before glancing up and down the carriage to see if anyone was looking at me funny. Not entirely convinced I had gotten away with it, I returned to the book.
Next thing I knew I was in Ipswich.
Dr. Snuggles… you’re a genius!
