Some highly motivated, ambitious folks believe that sleep is a waste of time.

Some others might label such a person, a “Type A” personality.

The fact is that our bodies perform a huge amount of maintenance work during the time that we sleep. So much that, people who spend less time sleeping tend to gain (or retain) more weight. Our bodies use up lots of calories during this nightly repair routine.

But, there are plenty of other uses for sleep. These include:

• Dreaming
• Problem Solving
• Creative Idea Incubation
• Stress Relief
• Insight – Ah Ha!

And, there are a lot of uses for the time, just before falling asleep:

• Programming our Dreams
• Programming for Brainstorming
• Programming for the Next Day
• Prayer for Others
• Self-Affirmations
• Self-Suggestions for Improved Self-Esteem, Improved Self-Confidence, Improved Interpersonal Relationships

There are also a lot of uses for the time just after we awake:

• Programming our Day
• Setting our Goals and Priorities
• Reviewing (Recording) our Dreams
• Adjusting our Attitude for the Day
• Meditation

During sleep, we enter several levels, or Altered States of Awareness. Some of these Altered States are akin to hypnosis, and programming ourselves just prior to sleep so that we use positive goal-directed suggestions is a productive use of sleep.

Upon awakening, instead of jumping up and rushing through our day, we can also focus on Affirmations and Autosuggestion.

Analysis and interpretation of our dreams also broadens our insights and intuitions. Our dreams contain more value to us than a most people discover because most people don’t pay attention to their dreams.

Dreams can:

• Analyze Other People, and Analyze Ourselves
• Provide Solutions to Problems
• Provide Clues and Strategies for More Productive Living
• Show us how to Interpret Other People
• Teach us a Visual Language, a Language of Metaphor
• Anchor Learning into Long-Term Memory
• Desensitize us from Phobias
• Show us Glimpses of the Future
• Show us Glimpses of our Past Lives
• Show us Glimpses of Other Dimensions

It is easy to reframe these uses of sleep and adjust our attitude that “Sleep is a waste of time.”

A bit of experimentation will open plenty of new vistas and new horizons for our sleep time.

Relax and let go, and discover that you have a lot of abilities and skills that reside in areas of your mind and your being beyond the highly-stressed, outcome-obsessed focus of your conscious mind.

Your conscious mind usually thinks in a linear, sequential fashion, but sometimes, other modes of thought are more productive.

Your conscious mind exercises executive functions, but other functions, i.e., managerial, creative, interpretive, intuitive, communicative, memory, habit integration and self-talk reside outside the conscous mind.

Using sleep to its full measure of profitability and productivity is easy and balances our lives.

Find the ways that are easy for you to use sleep, and you will reward yourself.