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How do people fall asleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack,” muses the unnamed protagonist in Dorothy Parker’s 1933 short story The Little Hours. “Early to bed, and you’ll wish you were dead. Bed before eleven, nuts before seven.”

You will almost certainly relate to this frustration if you have ever found it difficult to nod off. The more you try to create the right conditions for sleep, the more elusive it appears; the very desire makes it impossible to achieve. Parker’s character experienced such angst from her unwanted wakefulness that she considered “busting [myself] over the temple with a night-light”.…