11 min
6.471
1935
USA
A lecturer seated at a desk promises an informative film about how to sleep; it's a sequel to and inspired by "How to stay awake," which put his audience to sleep. He plans to examine the causes of sleep, the causes of insomnia, and recent research on sleep, including a time-lapse film of a man changing positions 55 times during an 8-hour rest: why exercise, he asks, when you can sleep like a top? The film instructs one on how to get a drink of water during the night without waking completely, and other useful skills for the insomniac.
Overview
Reviews
CinemaSerf wrote:One of life’s imponderables. Why is it that when we have no need to get up in the morning, we can rest easy but when we do, we toss and turn until ten minutes before we need to get up? Well this quite amiable short feature allows Robert Benchley to talk us through the do’s and don’ts of trying to get some sleep. Late night fridge-raiding doesn’t help, nor do dripping taps, or open windows or too much bedding. Apparently, we change positions at night some fifty-five times and using some fun time-lapse photography and an entertaining narration we look at some of the comfortable, foetal and downright ridiculous postures we adopt whilst trying to keep the blood from our brains for seven or eight hours per night. There’s the tiniest bit of science to this, but mainly it’s quite an enjoyable laugh at behaviour that we can all recognise, and when that is put into words it renders our solo night-time acrobatics suitably ridiculous.
