Wide Awake
A History of the Worst
Cures for Insomnia

Somewhere right now, a perfectly reasonable adult is lying flat in the dark, rigid as a plank, mentally herding sheep over a fence and assigning them each a backstory. Somewhere else, an Elizabethan is rubbing the rendered fat of a small dormant rodent into the soles of his feet. And in a hospital in Vienna circa 1820, a physician is anointing a patient’s temples with the milky sap of a flowering lettuce and recommending, with total professional confidence, a side of human breast milk.

This is what insomnia does to people. It is, on paper, the simplest problem imaginable: you would like to be unconscious, and you are not. And yet across the entire recorded span of human civilization — every culture, every century, every desperate hour between two and five in the morning — we have responded to a quiet inability to nod off with the full and terrifying force of our ingenuity. We have reached for plants, for poisons, for magnets, for emperors’ advice, for the entrails of sea creatures. We have built temples. We have, in several documented cases, accidentally invented the sedative overdose.

What follows is a curated tour of humanity’s finest sleep remedies — the ancient, the medieval, the eccentric, and the chemically alarming — ranked at last on the only scale that matters: the Wide-Awake Index™, calibrated from 1 (harmless; might genuinely help) to 10 (you are now more awake than before, possibly forever, possibly deceased).

Before we proceed into the dark canon of history’s cures, a moment of recognition for the modern insomniac who started this whole inquiry. Counting sheep, they reported, felt too impersonal — so the sheep were named. Annie, Betina, Christy, Dove, on through Zoe and back to the top. Four full passes through the alphabet later, the naming went international: Spanish, then French, then German. The flock grew. The flock developed opinions. The flock, eventually, began to speak.

It is, in the long view, a flawless reproduction of the oldest mistake in the field. The whole point of counting sheep is monotony — a task so dull the conscious mind surrenders out of sheer boredom. The instant you give a sheep a name, a nationality, and a tragic romantic history, you have replaced “boredom” with “worldbuilding,” which is the precise activity sleep scientists now warn against. Our correspondent did not fail at counting sheep. Our correspondent succeeded, completely, at the wrong thing.

They are our patron saint, and they are in distinguished company. As we are about to see, history is wall-to-wall with people who tried very hard to fall asleep and instead built something far more interesting and far more awake. Let us begin where the sleeplessness began.

Chapter I · Ancient Wisdom The Salad That Became a Statue

The ancients took sleeplessness seriously, by which we mean they took lettuce seriously. Several varieties of lettuce secrete a milky sap called lactucarium — nicknamed “lettuce opium” — which carries a genuinely mild sedative kick. The Egyptians prized it. Greek and Roman physicians prescribed it. Celsus listed lettuce among the great sleep-bringers alongside poppy and, intriguingly, the leek.

The high-water mark of lettuce devotion belongs to the Emperor Augustus, who reportedly credited the humble plant with curing a bout of insomnia and was so moved by the experience that he had a statue erected in its honor. Take a moment with that. The most powerful man in the known world, commander of legions, builder of empire, looked upon a leafy green that helped him nap and concluded: this deserves a monument. There is no record of the lettuce’s reaction.

The Romans also dabbled in the more spiritual end of the practice. Across the ancient Mediterranean, the sleepless made pilgrimage to temples of healing, where — for a fee and a ritual — you would lie down in a sacred chamber and hope a god turned up in your dreams to fix you. This is, technically, the world’s first sleep clinic. It had a roughly 100% success rate at getting you to lie down quietly in the dark, which is more than can be said for most of the cures that followed.

Pliny the Elder, naturalist and tireless cataloguer of every remedy he ever heard, contributed his own gems — including the recommendation of purslane, a small succulent, to “drive away the unclean dreams of venery.” Which is to say: the Romans were not only worried about whether you slept, but deeply concerned about the moral content of your dreams once you got there. A remarkable amount of ancient sleep medicine was, on close inspection, just chaperoning.

Chapter II · Folk Horrors The Greasing of the Feet

If antiquity reached for the salad bowl, the folk tradition reached, with stunning consistency, for the animal kingdom — and specifically for the parts of it nobody wanted. Here the logic turns sympathetic and frankly disturbing: to sleep deeply, you must borrow the essence of something that already sleeps deeply.

Enter the dormouse, nature’s champion napper, capable of dozing through the better part of a year. In Elizabethan England, the prescribed cure for sleeplessness was to render this magnificent hibernator down into fat and rub it on the soles of your feet. The reasoning was airtight: the dormouse sleeps; the fat is of the dormouse; therefore the foot, anointed, shall sleep. The fact that this involves going to bed with greased feet smelling faintly of rodent — and that you must first source and process a dormouse — was apparently considered a minor logistical hurdle on the road to rest.

Other cultures pursued the same theory with their own local fauna. In Japan, the entrails of the sea slug served as a traditional sleep aid. In medieval Europe, the gall of a castrated boar was thought to bring on slumber — a recipe that requires, at minimum, a boar, a veterinary procedure, and a degree of commitment to bedtime that borders on the heroic.

And then there is the cow-dung defense. In her 1760 household manual, Hannah Glasse advised those living in marshy areas to place cow dung at the foot of the bed — not, to be fair, as a sedative, but to keep biting insects away through the night. The intent was sound. The result, one imagines, was a bedroom so memorable that no insect (and no spouse, and no overnight guest) would forget it. It belongs on any honest list of sleep aids most likely to keep an entire household wide awake.

Chapter III · Medieval Pharmacology The Sleeping Draught That Could Kill You

The medieval pharmacist had genuine ambitions and a genuinely alarming medicine cabinet. The favored sleep botanicals — wild lettuce, henbane, hemlock, mandrake, the poppy — ran a steep gradient from “mildly drowsy” to “no longer breathing,” and the dosing science to distinguish between the two had not yet, shall we say, fully matured.

The crown jewel was dwale, a surgical sleeping potion of the late medieval period, brewed to render a patient insensible before an operation. The recipe combined wine with a greatest-hits collection of narcotics and outright poisons — among them lettuce, the gall of a boar, hemlock, henbane, and opium. It worked beautifully, in the sense that the patient stopped moving. Whether the patient subsequently resumed moving was, the records suggest, a separate and less reliable matter. Dwale is the original cure that cured the symptom by occasionally curing the patient.

The cleverer physicians, wary of poisoning their clientele, leaned on external application — laying the leaves of sedative plants on the temples and forehead rather than risking the stomach. One early-modern account describes a fevered, sleepless man finding relief simply by pressing cooling lettuce leaves to his brow. Wild lettuce, meanwhile, was frequently prescribed mixed with “woman’s milk” — human breast milk — a combination that managed to be simultaneously gentle, well-intentioned, and extremely difficult to obtain at two in the morning.

Not every medieval remedy involved swallowing or smearing a plant, to their lasting credit. Some physicians prescribed sound: the sufferer was to be soothed by soft music, by the rustle of trees in a light breeze, by water trickling over shells. This is, give or take a phone app, the exact “rainfall and ocean waves” playlist that several billion people fall asleep to tonight. The Middle Ages got there first, with shells.

Chapter IV · The Great Counting Catastrophe A Brief History of Failing at Sheep

And so we return, inevitably, to the sheep — and to the discovery that our opening correspondent reenacted a thousand-year-old blunder with uncommon thoroughness.

Counting sheep is ancient. One of its earliest written appearances is in the Disciplina Clericalis, a twelfth-century Spanish collection of tales drawn from Islamic sources, in which a weary storyteller, ordered by an insomniac king to keep talking, spins out an interminable account of a farmer ferrying an enormous flock of sheep across a river a few at a time — and promptly uses the tedium as cover to nod off himself. Cervantes recycled the same gag in Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza demands his master track each animal one by one — only Sancho, ever the contrarian, counted goats.

Here is the cruel twist, established by actual sleep research in 2002: counting sheep does not work. When Oxford scientists tested it on insomniacs, the sheep-counters took longer to drift off than people who simply imagined a calming scene like a beach or a waterfall. The theory is that counting demands just enough mental effort to keep the worried mind engaged — and not nearly enough to crowd out the day’s anxieties. The sheep, in other words, are a distraction that fails at being distracting.

Now consider our correspondent, who improved upon this failure with breathtaking dedication: not content with bland enumeration, they granted each sheep a name, then a second name, then a fourth alphabet’s worth, then nationalities spanning four languages. Where the standard insomniac merely keeps the mind mildly busy, our correspondent constructed an entire multilingual society with interpersonal dynamics, conversational standouts, and — the records confirm — parties. This is not a sleep aid. This is a literary salon that happens to convene in a bed. No wonder Zoe wouldn’t stop talking.

Chapter V · The Eccentric Geniuses Great Minds, Terrible Bedtimes

Fame and genius offer no protection from the 3 a.m. ceiling, and history’s brilliant insomniacs developed personal rituals of escalating peculiarity.

Charles Dickens, a lifelong and serious insomniac, became convinced that he could only sleep while aligned to magnetic north. He slept dead-center in the bed, arms outstretched, carefully confirming his hands were equidistant from each edge — and he traveled everywhere with a compass so he could reorient hotel beds to face north before retiring. When the alignment failed him, his backup plan was to walk it off: he prowled the streets of London through the night, sometimes covering as much as thirty miles. This is the rare cure that, while not curing insomnia, did directly furnish the city scenes and tortured characters of several major novels. Dickens didn’t beat his insomnia. He published it.

Benjamin Franklin, ever the empiricist, blamed warmth for his wakefulness and devised a two-pronged assault. First, the “air bath”: he sat undressed by an open window each morning, on the theory that cool fresh air invigorated the constitution. Second, and more practically, he kept two beds — when one grew too warm from his own body heat, he would simply rise and migrate to the cool, untouched one. It is, when you squint, an early and labor-intensive version of flipping the pillow to the cold side.

King George III, tormented by sleeplessness, was prescribed a hop pillow — a little muslin sack of hops tucked beneath the head, hops carrying a mild calming reputation thanks to a compound called lupulin. As royal sleep remedies go, this one is almost suspiciously reasonable, which is perhaps why it has quietly survived into the present as a herbal-pillow staple.

And then there is Thomas Edison, who belongs here as a cautionary inversion — a man who treated sleep not as a problem to solve but as an enemy to defeat. He famously regarded sleep as a waste of time and napped strategically; legend holds he would doze in a chair clutching steel balls over metal pans, so that the moment he drifted off, his hand relaxed, the balls clanged down, and he jolted awake to capture whatever half-dream he’d been having. It is the only entry in this entire history specifically engineered to prevent sleep. We include it as the patron device of every insomniac who, deep down, suspects the bed has it coming.

Chapter VI · Better Living Through Chemistry The Victorian Medicine Cabinet of Horrors

The nineteenth century, impatient with grease and compasses, simply reached for the hard stuff — and for a glorious, unregulated few decades, the hard stuff was available over the counter, next to the soap.

The era’s default sleep aid was opium, most often as laudanum — a tincture of morphine in alcohol, sold freely and dosed by the spoonful into adults, the elderly, and, most appallingly, infants. Teething syrups like the infamous Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup quieted babies extremely effectively by means of straight morphine, a fact the marketing tactfully omitted. “Soothing,” it turns out, is one word for it.

For the adult insomniac there were sturdier options: chloral hydrate, the Victorian sleeping draught (and, mixed into a drink, the original “Mickey Finn”), and potassium bromide, prescribed so enthusiastically that it spawned its own diagnosis — bromism, the syndrome of having taken so much sedative bromide that you became confused, unsteady, and rash-covered, but, to be fair, possibly asleep.

Hovering over all of it was the golden age of the gadget. Magnetism was the wellness craze of the century, and the lodestone-stuffed pillow — a cushion packed with magnetic iron ore — was sold as a cure-all, insomnia very much included. Mail-order catalogs hawked “electric” belts, brushes, and corsets promising, among a hundred other miracles, the restoration of restful sleep through the gentle application of current to one’s torso. None of it worked. All of it sold briskly. The through-line of human history is not that we find cures for insomnia; it is that we will reliably pay good money for the ones that don’t.

Conclusion What We Know, What We Don’t, and Why You’re Still Awake

Here is what modern science actually understands about falling asleep: keep the room cool and dark, keep a steady schedule, set down the glowing rectangle, and — crucially — give the racing mind a soft, low-effort place to rest, like an imagined beach or a slow walk through somewhere familiar. Not a task. Not a count. Not a project. Just a gentle, undemanding nowhere.

Which means the ancients with their soft music and trickling water were closer to the truth than the Victorians with their morphine syrups, and that the entire glorious parade of dormouse grease, castrated-boar gall, compass-aligned beds, lodestone pillows, and electrified torsos amounts to six thousand years of magnificent, sincere, beautifully documented missing-of-the-point. We have tried everything. We have anointed our feet, statued our salads, poisoned ourselves gently, walked across entire cities, and paid cash money to be mildly electrocuted. The one thing we have struggled to do, reliably, is the thing itself.

And that brings us back, as it must, to our correspondent and the flock. They were not wrong to count sheep — they were simply, like Augustus and Dickens and George III before them, doing the wrong thing with tremendous commitment. The cure for insomnia was never to know your sheep. The cure was to find them so unremarkable that the mind, bored beyond endurance, finally let go.

But let us be honest about what was traded. Somewhere out there is a person who cannot sleep, and who instead has Annie and Betina and Zoe and a four-language friend group with rich interior lives and a standing party invitation. That is not rest. It may, however, be the better deal. The rest of us merely lie in the dark. They have company, and apparently quite good conversation.

The next time you can’t sleep, skip the dormouse. Picture a quiet, dull, familiar place, and let your mind wander it without a clipboard. And if the sheep start talking again — and they will — at least take notes. You could write a book.