ten-minute period before you sleep and the ten-minute period after you wake up are profoundly influential on your subconscious mind.

Many of my relationships began with an idea from a journaling session, which then led to actively reaching out and, over time, cultivating a transformational relationship. In order to maximize this experience even further, you can become proficient at directing your subconscious mind-wandering while you sleep. Inventor Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” While transitioning from being awake to being asleep, your brain waves move from the active beta state into alpha and then theta before eventually dropping into delta as we sleep. It is during the theta window that your mind is most receptive to reshaping your subconscious patterns. Just before falling asleep, think and visualize about what you want your mind to focus on as you sleep.

Consider your state of mind—your consciousness—before going to sleep. This is extremely important. Make a commitment to spend at least fifteen minutes spiritualizing your consciousness before going to bed. Read something spiritual, listen to spiritual discourse or music, or engage in discussion on a spiritual topic. Push aside the chaos and confusion that were a part of your day, and focus on spiritual reality. In this way, you will prepare yourself for the next six to eight hours of sleep. If you allow yourself to focus spiritually, you will provide less of an opportunity for negative elements to enter your dreams. You can then benefit most from your sleeping state.

A still greater control is exerted over the thoughts during seep by their character during hours of wakefulness. By controlling the mind during entire consciousness, it will also be controlled during unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. Dr. Acton makes the following very appropriate remarks of this subject:- “Patients will tell you that they ‘’cannot’’ control their dreams. This is not true. Those who have studied the connection between thoughts during waking hours and dreams during sleep know that they are loosely connected. The “character” is the same sleeping or waking. It is not surprising that, if a man has allowed his thoughts during the day to rest upon libidinous subjects, he should find his mind at night full of lascivious dreams--the one is a consequence of the other, and the nocturnal pollution is natural consequence, particularly when diurnal indulgence has produced an irritability of the generative organs. A will which in our waking hours we have not exercised in repressing sexual desires, will not, when we fall asleep, preserve us from carrying the sleeping echo of our waking thought father then we dared to do in the day-time.”

Your behaviors before bed are coded into your long-term memory.1 While you’re sleeping, your brain processes everything you experienced that day. But not everything equally. This is why top-performing athletes — like Michael Phelps, the most winning Olympian of all time — create visualizations of success just before they go to sleep.

As you can experience days or hours within its framework in the dream state and not age for the comparable amount of physical time, so as you develop, you will be able to rest and be refreshed within psychological time even when you are awake. This will aid your mental and physical state to an amazing degree. You will discover and added vitality and a decreased need to sleep. Within any given five minutes of clock time, for example you may find an hour of resting which is independent of clock time.

A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.

Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

You're surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can't stand up under it. In the sleep period, you're free.

In fact, even fleeting feelings of delight can lead to dramatic increases in creativity. After watching a short, humorous video — Beeman uses a clip of Robin Williams doing standup — subjects have significantly more epiphanies, at least when compared with those who were shown scary or boring videos. Because positive moods allow us to relax, we focus less on the troubling world and more on these remote associations. Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active.

You’re surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can’t stand up under it. In the sleep period, you’re free.

More important than the time that you start your day is the mindset with which you start your day.

Be pleasant in the morning until ten o’clock, the rest of the day will take care of itself.