A brief, forced‐choice daily questionnaire was developed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of hypnotics over an extended period in outpatients with insomnia. The usefulness of this questionnaire, combined with the patients' ranking of successive weeks, was tested in two studies. The first, involVing 44 patients during three weeks, used a relatively potent hypnotic, 100 mg sodium pentobarbital, while the second, involVing 36 patients during four weeks, used a mild hypnotic, 2 Excedrin‐PM tablets. Both studies indicated the two subjective measures to be appropriate; the potent and the mild hypnotic were significantly discriminated from placebo under double‐blind conditions. The first study also included a magnetic pillow‐insert that was not differentiated from a placebo pillow‐insert, but that, nevertheless, appeared to have some central nervous system effects related to a greater frequency and more vividness of recall of dreams. It was concluded that these subjective measures are valuable for chronic hypnotic assays under “normal” (i.e., home) conditions where more objective laboratory techniques are not applicable.