Hypnosis & Sleep Learning (Part 3)

In 1947 a record called "Time to Sleep," made by Ralph Slater, became the subject of a court case. The record claimed to cure insomnia, but the government doubted this and eventually seized the records under provisions of the Federal Food and Drug and Cosmetic Act, saying the discs were misbranded.

Slater brought suit. In court in 1950, witnesses, including psychiatrists and neurologists, testified that tests they had made using the record yielded negative results. Sixty-eight people in the courtroom heard the record played and did not fall asleep. Some claimed to have been irritated and excited.

Backing up Slaters claims, a psychiatrist informed the court that the text was similar to that used by psychiatrists in treating patients, and that, under the proper conditions, it could induce sleep, although not in every instance. Another witness said there was no change in his patients' sleeping habits as a result of the record.

A witness for the defense stated that on four different occasions the record had helped him get much needed sleep. And, the director of the Sleep Shop at Lewis and Conger, the New York department store, said that his department had sold a substantial quantity of the record in the preceding three years, and less than four percent were returned by the purchasers.

Slater spoke in his own defense and asked that the case be dismissed as not coming under the Act, since it was not a food, drug or cosmetic.

Subsequently two neuropsychiatrists said that it could induce sleep if the subject were receptive to suggestion.

As a result, Judge Leo Rayfield ordered the records returned to Slater. But his judgment was later reversed by the Court of Appeals, which decided that the records and labeling were misleading and false because the discs proved wholly ineffectual in some tests.

Apparently this was a single record—an extremely unsophisticated version of the much more efficient sleep-learning and sleep-therapy equipment available today, with its automatic repeating tapes, electric timers, pillow speakers, and careful reduction of mechanical noise.

It is most essential that we recognize hypnotism stripped of the false raiment in which it has been clothed by history. The hypnotist is not a super-endowed being; with applied study and training, we are all hypnotists.

Since the door to the subconscious is best opened by suggestion, there is an evident relationship between hypnosis and the science of sleep-learning.