You will scarcely believe what a wondrous change for the better will happen to you if you make it a rule to have a brain clearing, mental inventory, and nerve relaxation every night before you sleep.
Your brain works at night always; oft-times you have no remembrance of your dreams, but if your last hour, before retiring, was an hour of excitement, tension or unusual occupation you will likely go over it all again in your dreams.
If you will let nothing prevent your period of soliloquy, or evening round-up, you will establish your mental habits into a rhythm that will give you peace, rest and benefit.
In the olden days, when most families had evening worship or family prayers, the members of those households slept soundly and restfully.
Particularly was this so because of the habit formed of getting the mind on peaceful, helpful, comforting, soul-satisfying thoughts that remained fresh on the brain tablets as the members of the home circle went to sleep.
One of the common practices in the home circle is reading, and generally the books or papers read are of the exciting, fascinating, highly colored imaginative type; people read stories of love, adventure, plot or crime, and they dream these same things most every night.
I have found that it pays to read two classes of literature in the same evening. First read your novel, story or fascinating book, and fifteen minutes before you are ready to go to sleep, read some good, wholesome, helpful, uplifting book, and that good stuff will be lastingly filed away in your brain.
Finish your evening with books that are interesting, yet educational. Such books as "Life of the Bee" by Maeterlinck, or any one of Fabre's wonderful books on insect life; "Riddle of the Universe," by Haeckle; Darwin's books; Drummond's "Ascent of Man;" "Walks and Talks in Geological Fields" is a splendid mental night cap; "Power of Silence;" "Physiology of Faith and Fear;" Emerson's "Essays;" Holmes' "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table;" Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Tom Moore's Poems; "Plutarch's Lives;" "Seneca;" "Addison;" Bulwer Lytton; Hugo; Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." This latter book will not fascinate you like Carlyle's "French Revolution," but you will learn to love its fine language, its fine analysis of character, of times, and of things.
There are countless books of the good improving kind. Always save one of them for your solid reading, after you have read light literature or novels. If you will get the habit you will notice great benefits and rapid advancement in your mental apparatus.
You will sleep better, think clearer; you will learn to enjoy mental pleasures more than material pleasures.