Unfortunately, you cannot pick and choose your night-dreams. But you have one great compensation; you can choose your daydreams, and you can make them just as effective in producing metabolic changes leading to specialized development as any night-dream.

Your day-dreams are generally a waste of time, not because the day-dream is inherently incapable of producing genuine and measurable development results, but because you usually indulge in it without the least consideration of the conditions required to make it an effective instrument of creation.

The day-dream is inherently your most powerful, your only efficient instrument for the planning and execution of constructive work of development and creation in yourself, but you must not expect to play that delicate instrument like an expert, without learning something about the laws that govern it, and without hard and persevering practice.

The following are points you must bear in mind if you wish to make of a day-dream an efficient instrument for the planning and execution of work of development and creation in yourself:—

Your work of development and creation will be strictly proportional to—

(1) The nature, quality, clearness, and definition of your plan of the end action.

(2) The strength of your wish for its realization.

(3) The nervous energy and the substance available for the execution of your plan.

(4) The ease of mechanical function in your body.

(5) The clearness with which you register and memorize all the changes of function and sensation generated in you by your day-dream.

That is, when you have mastered the First Series of Exercises preparatory to efficient work of repair during sleep, and feel you could let yourself lose consciousness, keep awake a while longer, and—

(i) Visualize yourself as clearly as possible performing perfectly the action (end action)— running, swimming, etc.—for which you want your night's work to make you more efficient.

(ii) Want that as strongly as you can, and enjoy your wish-image as much as you can.

(iii) Keep your hands and feet linked as you dream.

(iv) Keep the whole of your body completely relaxed the whole time.

(v) Before you allow yourself to lose consciousness, rest quietly for a while, keenly observe and memorize all changes of function and sensation.

In order that you may get a valid appreciation of the relative value of the five points enumerated above, you will occasionally leave one of them out of your exercises. For instance, having practised the day-dream of running a quarter mile with (iii), hands and feet linked, and observed the function and sensation changes that follow, you will repeat the exercises with your hands and feet spread out, register and memorize any difference occasioned, and you will draw your conclusions and decide on your practice accordingly.

If the above theory has not convinced you, fall back on a persevering practical test of not less than ten days. A great many golfers, tennis players, artists, etc., have improved themselves beyond recognition by this simple method, without any practice in addition to their normal routine, and victims of the most persistent insomnia have found complete and lasting relief from it.

But with sleep inefficiency, as with any other inefficiency that you wish to correct by making your day-dreams efficient instruments for planning development work, you must, above all things, remember: end action.

Again and again, I repeat, give up, once and for all, seeking unconsciousness for its own sake, and devote all your energies to creating in your mind, as you prepare for sleep, the dream of the end action of sleep, which is: waking up. But this image of your waking up must be the vivid image of the perfect waking up after the perfect sleep of the perfectly healthy child, the waking up with the spontaneous, generous, sustained stretch of the whole of your body.

Learn to dream consciously of waking up with a colossal and repeated stretch of everything in you after perfect sleep.

It is impossible to give an example of the Second Series of Exercises, equally suitable for all cases. Requirements vary from individual to individual and from time to time for the same individual. What follows is given you as a model which you must amend and adapt to your own needs of the moment. It provides a general plan for anyone seeking to extract from sound sleep the maximum physical development, as it stimulates metabolism in every part of the body.

Example Of The Second Series Of Exercises (Motor)

As you lie relaxed, whatever your age, go back in your mind to the fittest period in your life, which for most adults lies between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Endeavour to make all memories called up, and images created, real, vivid, and life-like.

Take yourself away for a holiday to the warmest and driest seaside resort you can remember with real pleasure. In bathing costume, stand with some friends of your own age, at the top of a good hard beach, about 150 yards from the shore, enjoy the sun, the breeze, the sea, and look forward to your bathe with joy. Just as you are about to move off towards the water's edge, one of your friends challenges you all to a race to the sea. You fall in line and an older friend prepares to start you. Take your mark, get set: one, two, three—go. Run for your life. At the quarter distance you lie third ... run hard to pass number two at the half distance ... then struggle fiercely to challenge the leader, catch him up and, after a terrific fight, leave him standing in a tremendous final burst of speed. (Pause for self-observation).

Get into the water, fight your way through the breakers, feel the stimulating blow each one gives you, get out of your depth, swim: get rhythm in your strokes, gradually increase their power, indulge in a few bouts of real speed; and then get back to shore. (Pause for self-observation).

Take off your bathing costume, catch hold of the roughest towel, and to get the maximum skin stimulation, rub every inch of your body in detail as hard and as fast as you can: the back, then the front of your trunk, your neck, face, scalp, your arms and hands to your finger-tips, your legs and feet to your toes. (Pause for self-observation).

Lie down on the burning sand and sunbathe. Feel the heat of the sand, air, and sun. From all three together get unlimited sun energy: let it pour into you through your skin, course through you with your blood, suffuse and vitalize your brain, all your organs and limbs, nerves, muscles, and bones; let every single cell charge up with sun energy as a battery, and enjoy it. (Pause for self-observation).

After a while, watch yourself in your mind, falling asleep on that beach. Imagine the deepest, soundest, and most recuperative sleep Nature can give you going on for hours. Sense this sleep and then watch your body fast asleep on that beach, as though you were outside it. (Pause for self-observation).

Imagine yourself, after hours of that marvellous sleep, gradually coming back to consciousness, amazingly fresh and vital, and feeling intensely the most irresistible urge to stretch. Imagine yourself stretching every limb in your body, again and again, to the fullest extent, first whilst still reclining, and then standing up. (Pause for self-observation).

The whole of the above mental exercises must be done with the body perfectly relaxed and with the hands and feet linked. At first the pauses for self-observation should take a minute or two. The whole of the exercises, which may take half an hour to begin with, can, with practice, be done efficiently in a few minutes.

If any detail in the above example is repellent to you, introduce any variation that will make it attractive. Write it down in its final appealing form so as to memorize it the better and persevere with it in that form every night, for two or three weeks, and note results.

Apply the same principle for any special requirements you have in mind, such as an improvement in any one particular work or function, carefully noting your progress.