If a child begins to suffer from active sleeplessness we must not make the mistake of urging him to sleep.  He is no more capable than we are ourselves of achieving sleep by an effort of will power.  To urge him to sleep is likely to cause him to keep awake because we direct his attention to the difficulty and make him fear that sleep will not come.  If he understands that all that he needs is rest, he will probably fall asleep without further trouble.

Day-dreams also may become abnormal, and tell of an unduly nervous temperament.  Any one who watches a little child at play will realise the strength of his power of imagination.  The story of Red Riding Hood told by the nursery fire excites in the mind of the child an unquestioning belief which is never granted in later life to the most elaborate efforts of the theatre.  All this imaginative force is natural for the child.  It becomes abnormal only when things seen and acts performed in imagination are so vivid as to produce the impression of actual occurrences, and when the child is so under the sway of his day-dreams that he fails to realise the difference between pretence and reality.  Imagination which keeps in touch with reality by means of books and dolls and toys is natural enough.  Not so imagination which leads to communion with unseen familiars or to acts of violence due to the organisation of “conspiracies” or “robber bands” amongst schoolboys.

If evidence of abnormal imagination appears, the child must be kept in close touch with reality.  We must give him interesting and rational occupation, such as drawing, painting, the making of collections of all sorts, gardening, manual work, and so forth.  In older children we must especially supervise the reading.

In many nervous children we find a faulty contact with environment, so that instead of becoming interested in the thousand-and-one happenings of everyday life and experiences, they become introspective and self-conscious.  As a result, sensations of all sorts, which are commonly insufficient to arouse the conscious mind, attract attention and, rising into consciousness, occupy the interest to the exclusion of everything else.  The conscious mind is not capable of being occupied by more than one thing at a time.  If attention is concentrated upon external matters, bodily sensations, even extreme pain, may pass altogether unnoticed.  The Mohawk, Lord Macaulay tells us, hardly feels the scalping-knife as he shouts his death song.  The soldier in the excitement of battle is often bereft of all sense of pain.  On the other hand, the patient who is morbidly self-conscious becomes oblivious of his surroundings while he suffers intensely from sensations which are usually not appreciated at all.  Self-conscious children will complain much of breathlessness and a sense of suffocation, of headache, of palpitation, of intolerable itching, of the pressure of clothing, or of flushing and a sense of heat.  Excessive