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Today’s insomnia cures are slightly more scientific than the back in the day. But they’re also less interesting, which is why we’ve rounded up some of the weirder insomnia treatments handed down through the ages. From what to rub on your feet, to what to line your belly with, here are 6 bizarre prescriptions for when you’re tired of counting sheep.
1. Rub Your Feet in Dormouse Fat
In Elizabethan England, people who couldn’t sleep would often rub dormouse fat onto the soles of their feet. Why dormouse and why feet has been lost to the ages, however, the dormouse has retained its snoozy image: The dormouse slept through most of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland.
2. A spoonful of Sea Slug Entrails
Most cultures have their own folk remedy, usually involving food, for putting insomniacs to sleep. I remember when I was a little girl, my mom would make me hot chocolate when I couldn’t sleep. Little girls in Japan, however, might have gotten a plate full of sea slug entrails. In France, it could have been fried lettuce and in places in the US, a raw onion.
3. Pay to Hear a Sleep Concert?
A new craze is sweeping Japan and while there’s always a new craze sweeping Japan, this one may offer some hope to sleepless office workers. They’re called sleep concerts: Basically, you buy a ticket to the concert, plunk yourself down in a comfy seat, and drift off. One such concert, titled “Dreams: Good Sleep Concert,” featured major Japanese musicians playing music that had been scientifically tested to induce sleep; a CD of the concert was later sold and won Japan’s 22nd annual Gold Disc Award for Best Instrumental Album of the year in 2008.
4. Ancient Ambien
Sleepless Greeks and Egyptians used opium, typically mixed with several other herbs that probably had no effect, to induce sleep. The only problem with opium is the highly addictive nature of the poppy-derived narcotic. But drugs have always played a part in helping people sleep: Cannabis, typically smoked in cigarette form, was a popular sleep aid up through the 19th century. Some, especially those in college or who maybe spent some time touring with the Grateful Dead, might say it still is. And when all else fails, there’s the time-honored tradition of drinking until you pass out.
5. Toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble
Potions have long been a part of the insomniac’s medicine cabinet. Tinctures made from valerian root, mandrake root, and lettuce seeds are a few of the debatably helpful but generally innocuous variety, whilst the Middle Ages prescription of “drinking a potion made from the gall of a castrated boar” is just gross. Incidentally, the castrated boar juice was also included in a concoction to knock victims – er, patients – about to undergo surgery in the Middle Ages as well. So many uses for castrated boar gall, who knew?
6. Carry a compass to bed with you
In the Victorian era, people tended to be interested in slightly dubious spiritualist theories, including those involving magnetic fields and their impact on human health. Charles Dickens, who suffered from insomnia and for a time, tried a combination of opium and alcohol that left him with a wicked hangover, ultimately found relief after placing the head of his bed due north.
Ed note: We couldn’t have written this article without help from Sean Coughlin’s book, The Sleepyhead’s Bedside Companion. And the image comes from those wonderful Serta sheep commercials.
Comments (10)
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Where can I find a CD of Dreams: Good Sleep Concert? Really hard to find.
posted by Joe on 3-30-2009 at 3:52 pm
And when all else fails, there’s the time-honored tradition of drinking until you pass out.
hahahaha. yes.
posted by Casey on 3-30-2009 at 4:32 pm
HAHAHA
Re captcha says: Guidance drinks
Touche.
posted by kokopeli420 on 3-30-2009 at 6:17 pm
The lettuce one is interesting. Herbalists at times used ‘Lactuca Scariola’ or hairy lettuce for sleep. It was called lettuce opium. They both have a milky sap.
And on Valerian root, before Valium…..
There have been MANY drugs initially derived from plants.
posted by DLRCnows on 4-1-2009 at 1:14 am
Hmmm…Cannabis used to make me sleepy, but sometimes it’s makes me energetic. Opiates made me energetic sometimes too. It was the benzos (Xanax, Ativan, Clonopin, Valium) that knock me out completely. Oh and Ambien/Ambien CR. After a while the dose doesn’t work and you build a tolerance (like with everything else) and it’s never a good thing to increase sleeping pills or benzos.
posted by Julie Bing-a-ling on 8-22-2009 at 3:37 am
Things that really work are lettuce and cloro-trimeton (or any antihistaminic) they get all but the most serious cases to sleep good and fast.
posted by Sleepless on 8-31-2009 at 2:17 pm
Sleepless, some people (myself and my sister included) don’t have the typical antihistamine sleepy reaction: we get WIRED. As a result, Tylenol PM and its ilk makes me incredibly productive and only contributes to the insomnia. I guess that would make me a chronic “serious case” :)
posted by Megan on 10-26-2009 at 4:31 pm
I often have trouble going to sleep — not to the degree that I feel I suffer out-and-out insomnia, but when I toss and turn, it is irksome. I’ve never taken a sleeping pill in my life, as I’m afraid of getting used to them, and I don’t want to become dependent on them. Yes, I could drink, but I drink more than enough already, and the last thing I want to do is drink a bunch and wake up useless tomorrow.
Before I say what works reasonably well for me, let me say I’m not going all “New Age-y” on you. I just read this in a book a guy wrote when he went to some monastery in the Himilayas decades ago to learn about Tibetan Buddhist meditation methods (and the religion generally, but that’s irrelevant here). In one passage, he specifically wrote about meditating to go to sleep when you’re having trouble doing so.
Get in the position most comfortable for you. (Flat on my back doesn’t work for me, though that’s what he recommended.) If you can clear your mind, fine, do that. I can’t, so my Plan B is to think of something pleasant enough to me that it gradually focuses all my attention on it. Something calm and relaxing. Taking it easy by the seaside. Drifting along lazing on a cloud, or maybe like a weather balloon, miles high.
As I marvel in that imagined beauty and comprehend, if barely, how much grander life is than whatever it is niggling at me keeping me awake, I soon relax, and drift off to sleep.
posted by Mekhong Kurt on 11-24-2009 at 7:20 pm
Well, if you have trouble sleeping do not resort to alcohol or sleep meds, they will hurt your sleep cycle in the long run! Instead have a turkey sandwich and a glass of warm milk (which has been a long time remedy). These work because they increase serotonin levels, and with an increase of serotonin melatonin (the hormone which causes sleepiness) increases. Also, make sure the area where you’re going to be sleeping is very dark, this also increases melatonin.
And along with Mekhong another good way to sleep is deep relaxation. If you’ve ever been to a hypnotist you’ve probably heard this. Start with your toes and relax them, each individual toe until it’s ‘’sinking” into the mattress, continue up your body focusing entirely on the part of your body you’re relaxing. It takes a lot of discipline to not let your mind wander, but if you succeed it’s extraordinarily useful. And to help your mind not just drift aimlessly, pick an image that relaxes you and you can start to imagine quite vividly. I picture my fiancee and i in a wheat field, the grains slowly blowing in the warm breeze while the air smells like rain.
Hope that helps :)
posted by tess on 12-13-2009 at 10:11 pm
Tess, speaking of turkey, serotonin and melatonin… the thing that has worked for us is sleeping with a weighted blanket. A weighted blanket induces the same kind of cozy, calm, sleepy feelings as turkey and/or warm milk. My husband used to snore and toss and turn, but not since he started using a weighted blanket.
posted by Mary Lewis on 12-16-2009 at 1:00 pm