Understanding your daydreams can help you fall asleep at night. ‘People daydream very elaborately before they go to sleep,’ according to Professor Emeritus Jerome Singer from Yale University, a pioneer researcher on the topic. ‘There’s a continuity between daydreams and night dreams.’

If you have problems falling asleep, it may be that when you’re trying to sleep, your daydreams are too structured’maybe you’re thinking about work, or planning something detailed, or trying to solve a problem. Instead, set aside time before you go to bed to think through these issues. When you want to fall asleep, let your daydreams become fanciful, free, strange and wild. Soon you’ll be swept out of conscious control and into the land of sleep.