Some people can seemingly sleep at will, and it comes as naturally to them as eating or walking. I am not of this tribe. In the years before there was a general "sleep awareness" in society, I used to have pretty bad sleep, something that occurred to me only in hindsight. I remember being quite sleepy and inattentive in school and college. I thought this was a natural consequence of these institutions being dreadfully boring. Which is true, but I also wasn't good at sleeping. Most of my problem was being able to fall asleep. No one teaches you how to sleep.I have, over the years, developed a sleep technique that works reasonably well for me. It obviously depends on how well I have done "sleep prep"—the usual popular advice about timing when to eat, avoiding caffeine, wind-down rituals etc. But on a good day, my process of falling asleep takes around 15 minutes.This is roughly how it works:Sleep is not like a dog on a leash that you tug to get it to walk with you. Sleep is like a cat. I must sit still, I must not think of the cat or gesture at it. Play a little hard to get, and only then may the cat may come to your lap.Focus on the breath, and gravity. Let stray thoughts pass like clouds, but do not become the thought. When you do this right, the thoughts eventually run out, you let muscles relax, until you feel as weighty as a wet towel on a kitchen counter.There may be temptations to shift positions because the current one doesn't feel "quite right." In most cases I remind myself that I won't die if I don't shift positions. Sometimes that thought makes the discomfort go away, much in the same way one may realise they are not drowning because the pool is 4 feet deep. If the discomfort is real and continues despite it, I permit shifting positions—it's not worth resisting these things and having fights in your own head about this.Getting to the wet-towel phase is the most important part. Once you are there, there isn't anything to do. To keep the nothingness going, I look at patterns of shifting shadows in my closed eyelids, along with sounds. It has the same kind of feeling as staring into a flame. At this point, sleep sets in.