In our many years of research at the Institute of Pointless Studies, one important question that we have tried to address is the problem of insomnia and insufficient sleep. If you are trying to get sufficient sleep, it is important to have as little mental stimulation as possible. The most desirable state of mind to cultivate is one of boredom, lassitude and disinterest. As part of our research we have studied hypnotic states, somnambulism, stereotypical lethargy, mind-decelerating pharmacology and devoid phenomenology. In one five-year experiment, Professor K. McCoy encouraged her subjects to spend 15 hours a day in a darkened room listening to white noise and meditating on the void. Unfortunately none of the subjects were willing to continue to the end of the experiment, but the preliminary results in terms of sleep were most encouraging.
While some of the traditional methods of getting to sleep, such as counting sheep or listening to sounds of ocean waves, have had erratic results in experimental settings, we have established that the most consistently successful strategy is to read a book until you achieve a state of sufficient sleepiness. The challenge is to avoid books that are too exciting or intriguing, as the last thing you want when you are preparing for sleep is powerful mental stimulation. Many novels or works of non-fiction have at least some ability to fascinate the reader and to provoke unwanted trains of thought which, if not checked, may spiral into a state of dreadful wakefulness.
As a response to this discovery we compiled this collection of short texts. Each page is guaranteed to be devoid of excitement. All challenging or stimulating elements have been removed, and we have endeavoured to set and design the text in such a way as to befuddle the mind, inducing a state of hypnotic dreaminess and languor. The text has been prepared by a team of high-grade bores, emotionless drones and experts in dispiritingly pointless areas of academia. Professor McCoy’s illustrations and designs add an additional layer of soporific confusion which is guaranteed to induce a powerful state of lethargy. In experiments, these texts have put 97 per cent of subjects to sleep within ten minutes 58 per cent of the time in 73 per cent of the conditions studied within an acceptable range of experimental error. Consequently we have gathered these experimental texts together into this book. We sincerely hope you find it as boring to read as we did to write it.
Professor K. McCoy and Dr Hardwick