[mrodent]

I’m glad you had a think about what I recommended.

In fact this isn’t quite what I meant. I failed to make myself clear.

This isn’t about “engaging in an alternate activity”. This is very specifically about reading. A programme for reading, a recommended way of reading. No other activity, just reading.

Reading, reading as a long-term habit, commitment and lifestyle choice, at once stimulates, calms and tires your mind like no other activity. And I don’t mean with a perspective of one night in isolation. I’m talking about becoming a night-time reader: learning how to be a reader, to help yourself to cultivate the profound cerebral calmness and tiredness that only reading-as-a-way-of-being can procure.

Again I have to say, though, that I wouldn’t expect instant results. Long-term reading during the night, but (as described) only in bite-sized segments if you don’t feel like reading more than a page or so, interspersed with turning off the light and lying there in the dark, with no expectations (other than that you will be awake until dawn). This “alternating phase”, where you lie there in the dark, **absorbing** what you’ve just read, is an equally valuable part of the alchemy.

I’d also tend to recommend generally erring on the side of slightly more challenging reading. But all reading is good.

Anyway, this is what worked for me and I hope it might work for others.

[Author]

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