Wonders of Sleep

You spend about eight out of every 24hrs, or one third of your entire life, in sleep. Sleep is a divine law and also many answers to our problems come to us when we are in a deep sleep.

Your subconscious mind never rests or sleeps. It is always active, controlling all your vital forces. The healing process takes place more rapidly while you are asleep, because there is no interference from your conscious mind. Remarkable answers are given to you while you are asleep.

Lack of asleep can cause you to become irritable, moody and sometimes depressed. All human beings need a minimum of six hours of sleep to be healthy. Most people need more. Those who think they can get along on less are fooling themselves. Medical researchers who have investigated sleep processes and lack of sleep point out that severe insomnia have led to psychological breakdown in some instances.

One way to find out why we need sleep is to look at what happens when we do not get it. In 1964, a seventeen -year old boy named Randy Gardner kept himself awake for 264 hours i.e., eleven straight days! Medical tests showed that during the time he was awake, his thinking process deteriorated. His speech became slurred. He also suffered from memory lapses.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as many as 200,000 traffic accidents a year are related to sleep problems. Drivers are five to ten times more likely to have an accident late at night than during the daytime.

 There was a man named Ray Hammerstrom who worked as a roller in a Pittsburgh steel mill. Despite the best efforts of the installers, a machine which was installed recently could not be made to work properly. Ray thought a lot about the problem. He also tried to figure out a new design, but nothing worked. One afternoon he lay down for a nap. As he fell asleep, he thought about the problem. During his nap he had a dream in which he saw a perfect design for the problem. When he got up, he sketched his new design according to his dream. This visionary cat nap won Ray a check for $15,000, the largest award the firm had ever given an employee for a new idea.

Remember that, your future is the result of your habitual thinking which is already in your mind unless you change it through prayer. There is nothing strange in the dream where you see the headlines of the newspapers long before the events even take place. Tomorrow’s events are in your subconscious mind. So are the next week’s and next month’s. No disaster or tragedy can happen to you if you decide to pray. Nothing is predetermined. Your mental attitude ie the way you think, feel, believe determines your destiny.

-Sahil Shaparia