11. HOMER J, all round good guyOriginally posted by Kathy@Apr 25 2005, 09:14 AM
Ardross, you are not alone. Perhaps one of these remedies may help?
10 Famous Insomniacs
1. MARLENE DIETRICH, actress
Dietrich said that the only thing that lulled her to sleep was a sardine-and-onion sandwich on rye.
2. AMY LOWELL, poet
Whenever she stayed in a hotel, Lowell would hire five rooms - one to sleep in, and empty rooms above, below, and on either side, in order to guarantee quiet.
3. W.C. FIELDS, actor
The aging Fields resorted to unusual methods to go to sleep. He would stretch out in a barber's chair (he had always enjoyed getting haircuts) with towels wrapped around him, until he felt drowsy. Sometimes he could only get to sleep by stretching out on his pool table. On his worst nights, he could only fall asleep under a beach umbrella being sprinkled by a garden hose. He told a friend that `somehow a moratorium is declared on all my troubles when it is raining'.
4. ALEXANDRE DUMAS, author
Dumas suffered from terrible insomnia, and after trying many remedies, he was advised by a famous doctor to get out of bed when he couldn't sleep. He began to take late-night strolls, and eventually started to sleep through the night.
5. JUDY GARLAND, actress
As a teenager, Garland was prescribed amphetamines to control her weight. As the years went by she took so many that she sometimes stayed up three or four days running. She added sleeping pills to her regime, and her insomnia and addiction increased. She eventually died of a drug overdose.
6. TALLULAH BANKHEAD, actress
Bankhead suffered from severe insomnia. She hired young homosexual `caddies' to keep her company, and one of their most important duties was to hold her hand until she drifted off to sleep.
7. FRANZ KAFKA, author
Kafka, miserable with insomnia, kept a diary detailing his suffering. For October 2, 1911, he wrote, `Sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep soundly, but after an hour I wake up, as though I had laid my head in the wrong hole.'
8. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, US president
His insomnia cure was a shot of cognac in a glass of milk.
9. GROUCHO MARX, comic actor
Marx first began to have insomnia when the stock market crashed in 1929 and he lost $240,000 in 48 hours. When he couldn't sleep, he would phone people up in the middle of the night and insult them.
10. MARK TWAIN, author
An irritable insomniac, Twain once threw a pillow at the window of his bedroom while he was a guest in a friend's house. When the satisfying crash let in what he thought was fresh air, he fell asleep at last. In the morning he discovered that he had broken a glass-enclosed bookcase.
J used to avoid going to bed when he had an unpleasant day ahead, in a pathetic attempt to make the night last longer and this put off the impending gloom. Instead he would stay up supping bacardi breezers and listening to Rage Against the Machine's first album on repeat. Fearful for J's plight, his flatmate discovered a remedy which involved a 3 iron delivered at speed to the back of J's head. This also had the effect of making J's fretting for what he faced the next day pale into nothing.
