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Memory and the Mind – a Dreamscape


Did you ever consider the complexity or development of your mind correlates and corresponds with your dreams? The caveman who hunts by day and eats at the campfire has dreams little more than this and the world of his senses. The engineer, with immense training, living in a complex world, performing complex tasks by day, necessarily has more complex dreams intertwined with everyday events of friends and family. 
While this seems natural and simple, a step more complex is involved. All those complex dreams of the engineer use the advanced workings and training of the mind and memory, testing, working, and variating those same mental features used by day.  In fact, during the dreams, the mind gets a “nighttime workout.” The result is a more pliable and active mind for the next day. 
Although most of us enter adulthood with a mind mostly trained, we can simulate or actuate higher-order mental features by giving the conscious mind a boost before dreaming.  One way is reading before bed or playing some skill game (Chess, Sodoku are two). Recitations or story-telling are others. We read to children at night, and the benefits are more than simply parent-child relations. You can put money on those “night people” who work late into the evening, who may have the most interesting dreams.
It has been proven that reading to comatose patients can help with their recovery.  The reading stimulates the mind to its higher functions, hopefully activating it to consciousness. Teachers read to their classes is for more than entertainment. It activates and stimulates the child’s mind. Every school has a chess club. In Chinese schools, students get serious about the game of Go, a complex game of strategy and capture. Even the football team coach seeks to activate the minds of the players by forms of meditation and memorization!
Get ready for bedtime! Use your mind, day and night, especially at bedtime. Dreaming can be your personal post-graduate school. 
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There is the old saying about the brain: "Use it or lose it."
There should be another old saying: "Many will not use it if they don't have to."

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