will himself to sleep. In insomnia it is the attempt to replace the
unconscious auto-suggestion by a conscious voluntary effort of will
that causes the difficulty. A thousand times in the night we resolve
that now we _will_ sleep. If we could but cease to make these
fruitless efforts, sleep might come of itself and the suggestion or
habit be re-established.

In little children the suggestion of sleep, provoked by being placed
in bed, sometimes acts very irregularly. Often it may succeed for a
week or two, and then some untoward happening breaks the habit, and
night after night, for a long time, sleep is refused. The wakeful
child put to bed, resents the process, and cries and sobs miserably,
to the infinite distress of his mother. It then becomes just as likely
that the child will connect his bed in his mind, not with rest and
sleep, but with sobbing and crying on his part, and mingled entreaties
and scoldings from his nurse or mother. An important part in this
perversion of the suggestion is played by the attitude of the person
who puts the child to bed. Often the nurse is uniformly successful,
while the mother, who is perhaps more distressed by the sobbing of the
child, as consistently fails, because she has been unable to hide her
apprehension from him, and has conveyed to his mind a sense of his own
power.

Just in the same way, grown-up people, filled with anxiety because of
the helplessness of the young child, unable to divest their minds of
the fears of the hundred and one accidents that may befall, or that
within their own experience have befallen, a little child at one time
or another, unconsciously make unwise suggestions which fill his mind
with apprehension and terror. They do not like their children to show
fear of animals. Nor would they if it were not that their own