How to Sleep - page 6

The other method is, on the contrary, to think of extremely simple matters, some representative ideas known since long ago and in general practice. Among these, an effective method is to count the number of sheep jumping over the fence of a pasture. As for the pasture, you simply have to imagine a green plain. Detailed background is unnecessary. It gets too complicated with a mountain or a river, and a waterfall or an iceberg only makes it worse. You only need to imagine a plain around Australia. Even if you don't know the place, you need not to go to see it. The simplest image is a streak of fence lying in the middle of a view, parting the right from the left.
Then the sheep will appear, black or white as you like, but only the sheep of the same colour must be cast. You should never mix various colours together, or for a change, never cast a humpbacked or limping sheep. If such sheep should appear, you should try either to accept or neglect them, convincing yourself that they were normal sheep, calming yourself down to count the next sheep. For these sheep, the best direction of appearance is to enter simply from the right, jump over the fence in a step, then exit to the left without any greeting; and you should never let them make unnecessary performances such as forward double somersaults or backward taking-off and somersault with double twist over the fence. Ordinarily you can fall into a sleep by the time you have counted fifty or at most a hundred sheep which appear one after another. However, if you can not, you may count further on. But when you reach the state of half-sleep and half-wakefulness by counting many sheep, sometimes an animal quite different from a sheep may appear. It may be, say, a giraffe with a crooked neck or an elephant without a trunk; and when you encounter such a strange animal, it is quite important to regard it as a kind of sheep and to let it go at that. On occasion, a deformed elephant may staggeringly enter, hop but be unable to jump over the fence, stumble at its feet and fall down with a thud. Even in such instances you should reg ard it as having jumped over the fence uneventfully and should perish the thought from your mind.
In the case of the person going to sleep being a man, according to his physiological status, a naked woman may suddenly appear in place of a sheep. In that case also, you should regard her as a sheep and press on. If stimulated by her nudity you take off your clothes and run after her, you will achieve not sleep but only fatigue.
The woman may come up and stand by the bed. Of course, if you jump out of the bed and reach for her, she will run away. It is a woman's nature to run away at least once even if she likes you. You will run after her but never catch up. It is a woman's nature to keep running and keep you hanging forever. Since you are wide awake by this time, you should run after her exhaustively and get exhausted. While you climb a mountain, go across a valley, cross a desert or run through a metropolis in the night naked, you will be dead tired. When you get sleepy through fatigue, the woman or your partner usually begins to transform itself into something weird. Or so many women would appear that you cannot tell who's who. You may catch them one by one, but you may turn out with an old woman wrinkled with age, or a cyclops. Soon you will get irritated and begin to transform your body. On many occasions you wi ll become a huge monster and start to destroy your surroundings with a roar. If you become a monster, then in the end you will be killed by man, either burned, or fall from the rooftop of a building. In this way the monster will breathe its last breath and lose consciousness. By this time you, too, are already fast asleep, or truly dead.