Thread: Better than Counting

I'm going to try this again tonight, but twice now it has worked well for helping me get to sleep quickly...

Spoiler for Better than Counting:

A programmer started to cuss
because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while( !asleep( ) ) sheep++;

.....no, that's not it

The thing is that counting doesn't seem to keep my mind busy enough; it's too easy to keep track of, and I give it a bit of overkill on focus because of that. I get to 100 over and over again... So I decided to try something that I read in a book once. o.O

Just execute this in your mind (I do this now because I'm too lazy to explain it in proper English at the moment )

N is 1
Loop M from 1 to 20 and imagine saying "N times M is NM"
Increase N by 1 and repeat

What I say is actually more like this:
"once one is one... once two is two... ...... once twenty is twenty....
twice one is two... twice two is four... twice three is six... ....." etc.
When I reach twice twelve or twice fourteen I usually lose count due to being so close to sleep.

I hope this works as quickly for you as it did for me... If you keep getting all the way to 20, just increase N and repeat. Eventually you will be too sleepy to carry on, but the problem will be too complex for you to care to do it (meaning that you don't notice you've stopped), and you will lose count and fall asleep.

Unfortunately for me, I snore when on my back and on my back is the best position to be in when trying to forget about what I feel...So I am doing this while holding muscles in my throat near the sinuses to keep it nice and wide...but when I start to fall asleep those muscles relax, and I feel the sudden lack of ease in breathing, feel the thrashing of the snore, and also hear it... O_o On top of that, when I start to enter sleep I have a bad habit of becoming lucid before it even starts, and the jolt of sudden cognitive thinking disturbs the weak dream into oblivion But I'm assuming most of you have trained yourselves to allow the dream to solidify before firing any synapses... >.>