19-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, November 13, 1914: Am awfully sleepy at present, so good-night.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Goodnight Grandma—
Have a sweet and dreamless sleep.
—
According to a hundred-year-old book:
A sound sleep is dreamless. Dreams require a certain expenditure of nerve force and mental energy, so that dreamless sleep is the most restful. Disagreeable dreams and nightmares are generally associated with indigestion and biliousness, which also occasion a general restlessness.
Personal Hygiene and Physical Training for Women (1911) by Anna M. Galbraith
A Hundred Years Ago 
Oh dear. I must have been rather bilious lately. That explains everything. 🙂
I’m glad this post enlightened you. 🙂
This is such a personal and intimate entry. Love it.
She sounds like she was so relaxed when she wrote it.
Yes, that sums it up very well.
Sometimes, in her entries, it almost feels like Helena is speaking to us across the years . . .
Sometimes it seems like she talks to her diary as if it was a friend.
Sweet diary entry. When I read the quote from the book, I was reminded that my mom always related a bad dream I would have to something I ate for dinner!
Interesting. . . apparently this was a fairly widely held understanding of what caused dreams years ago.
When she says “Good night” it is almost like she knows we are readibg it 100 years later.
It’s like she was talking to a friend.
Maybe it’s true that digestion problems can trigger dreams, but I know from experience that nightmares easily arise without such triggers. Now in my seventh decade, my dreams are worse, and the same is true of my wife’s. I’m convinced we both have a degree of PTSD, having had plenty of stressful episodes in our adventurous lives. So far as I know, there has been no definitive scientific study of the phenomenon, but one thing I can vouch for: strong emotions will set memories in permanence and then provide the basis for nightmares.
It also seems to me like I’m more like to have dreams when I’m upset about something or having a very restless sleep.
I am skeptical about the sleep advice. I don’t dream much. Most of the dreamless time I wouldn’t call my sleep sound.
My mother would sometimes wake from a dream with a blood-curdling scream. Then dad would grumble about it as they went back to sleep.
It sounds like there were some really terrifying happenings in her dreams. Could your mother remember her dreams afterwards?
I never asked her about them. I wish I had.
It’s the same with me. There are things that I wish I’d asked my parents, but I never thought about them at the time.
I am not surprised that she will end her diary soon, I think she is getting tired of trying to write daily 🙂
She is growing up and her interests are changing.
We now know that dream cycles are a part of our sleep. One must wake up during a dream to remember it, or to know that we’ve had a dream! ❤
Good night Helena – Sweet dreams!
Diana xo
It’s interesting how we are unaware of most of our dreams.
Written long before we learned about REM and sleep cycles … But sweet.
We sure have a much better scientifically-based understanding of sleep and dreaming now.
I agree with the comment that said it seemed like Grandma was writing across the years
I’m reminded of how some people start diary entries with the words “Dear Diary.” At a minimum it seems like she considered the diary to be a friend.