Hardwick - This Book Will Send You to Sleep

Sleep smarter

The indispensable bedside classic Leland Carlson, Assistant Vice President of the Dull Mens Club

This Book Will Send You to Sleep makes no claims to be fun or interesting. It is a book you can read in full confidence that you will find absolutely nothing to stimulate your brain. A book, like no other, that will afford you much sleep and copious amounts of pointless knowledge.

Where else will you read about the political crisis in Belgium 20072011 or study the growth pattern of holly? And from where else can you find, in one place an overview of railway gauges, a summary of the administrative bureaucracy of the Byzantine Empire and instructions for the creation of a collapsible music stand?

Prepare to fall fast asleep with the most boring book ever published.

Professor K. McCoy specialises in the analysis of hypnotic states and somnambulism. She lives on the Coast and spends one hour every day, except Mondays, moving rocks to build a sea wall. Dr Hardwick is an expert in stereotypical lethargy. He is one of the worlds foremost authorities on and curators of screwdrivers.

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 McCoys 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

The 200711 political crisis was a period of instability in Belgium. The issues that provoked the crisis included the question of state reform, and whether the electoral district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde should remain as a single electoral district, or be separated into two electoral districts. Following the 2007 elections there were 196 days of negotiations before a coalition could be formed. However, after the 2010 elections, there was an even longer period of 541 days negotiation before a coalition could be formed. During these negotiations, a wide variety of Belgian politicians took charge of the discussions, in a variety of political roles. Bart De Wever of the New Flemish Alliance was in charge of the talks from 17 June 2010 to 8 July 2010 in the role of informateur. The title of formateur is used in Belgium to refer to the person who steers negotiations about a coalition government. The job of an informateur is to conduct preliminary talks that will lay the groundwork for the subsequent work of a formateur.

After De Wever, Elio Di Rupo of the Socialist Party became pre-formateur, a title that also refers to someone who lays the groundwork for a formateur, but who is not identified as informateur since he may go on to become formateur or even prime minister himself (while informateurs are more properly regarded as actual or potential assistants to the formateur). Di Rupo was in charge of the talks until 3 September 2010, after which he was replaced by Danny Pieters and Andr Flahaut who were Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives respectively. They were jointly referred to as mediators, rather than as formateurs, informateurs or pre-formateurs. When their talks collapsed on 5 October 2010, De Wever took charge of the talks once more, but now instead of being known as the informateur, he was the clarificator. From 21 October 2010 to 26 January 2011 Johan Vande Lanotte became mediator and the talks continued.