The amount of sleep that suited you last year may not suit you to-day. You may really be getting better sleep and so needing less of it: or you may have to make up by quantity for a poorer quality. The test is that, if you are sleepy in waking hours, you need better sleep or more of it. If you are wakeful in sleeping hours, you need less sleep or else you are not getting the right kind. Good sleep is a habit, a natural habit as distinguished from an acquired habit, and when we learn to take it naturally, and in natural amount, we get a great deal more from it. It is fair to assume that purely natural habits, which continue from age to age through all stages of human progress, are essential to human welfare. Otherwise they would drop away from us as many useless physical parts have dropped. If you stop to think of this, you know that it is so; the man in the street and the girl at the ribbon counter do not know, so there is more excuse for them if they misunderstand. It may be that they usually sleep better than you do, and so do not need to know it. CHAPTER IV WHAT SLEEP MAY MEAN O Sleep, we are beholden to thee, Sleep, Thou bearest angels to us in the night, Saints out of heaven with palms. JEAN INGELOW. We know so little about sleep, positively, that anyone may assume one thing or another about it, so long as what he assumes accords with what we do know positively. It has been surmised that, during sleep, the subconscious mind is busy with the day’s impressions of the objective mind,[2] fitting and relating them to past experiences, the sum of which makes up the man himself. The subconscious mind is, in a sense, man’s attitude to life. It receives suggestions more easily than the objective mind receives them, and has more effect upon man’s understanding of life. If our last conscious thought is a loving thought toward all living things, we have aided the latent mind in its effort to get in tune with the infinite harmony of life. Alice Herring Christopher, the metaphysician, once told me that every night as she drops off to sleep she says to herself that she is going to have a lovely time, and as a consequence she does; and that, on waking, she tries to realize how delightful her sleep has been. [2] In an examination of the theory of the “subjective” and the “objective mind,” see chap. vii. There is an old saying that, when a baby smiles in its sleep, it is because the angels are whispering to it, and, if we kept ourselves in communion with the substance of things, “angels” might bring us sweet messages, too. They surely will, if we drop to sleep as lovingly and peacefully as a little child.