Most people think that the heart is the most important vessel that pumps blood throughout the body. Little do they know that the brain controls the pumping. The brain is one of the most fragile organs of the body, yet it could potentially give you great knowledge and ideas. How does the brain get enough energy to think of great ideas? Through sleep! Sleep helps both our mental health, and physical health. It plays a vital role in mental health because it makes people feel more safe, and it helps people go to their "happy place." Sleep helps the brain prepare it for the next day, by organizing and memorizing the information it has learned and prepare for what it will learn. Sleep also helps the brain cope with change and emotions. Physically, the brain helps the body repair itself, and quenches the pain of the vessels and their injuries. While these points are widely known, there are other questions we don't know. What connection is there between the brain and dreams while we sleep? How does sleep prepare us for the next day? Such important questions should lead to important answers.

         How are dreams formed and how does my brain prepare itself while sleeping? These are some of the many questions that got me interested in this topic. When I fall asleep every night, I dream. One night, I was dreaming about looking at myself while I was sleeping, and I was wondering what I was thinking. There are so many questions that I had and that have been unsolvable. This doesn't mean that they can't be thought of. Though When Benjamin Franklin dared to think about electricity, he didn't understand it fully until ten years after. Even if I am not the one to solve this question, someday, somebody will.

           What benefits come from sleep? Psychologists and medical doctors have studied such questions. There are many questions that have been solved like the benefits of sleep. Sleep helps exhaustion go away, because sleep is just like a drug. The most powerful out there. When the body hits the mattress, it gives up to exhaustion and stress. It's like the body powers down like people power down like their electronics. However, this is not entirely true. Though the body Is unconscious, its brain is still awake helping its skills and memory better, healing the body, and getting it ready for the next morning. Sleep helps the electrons and neurons in our body synchronize and perform at a faster rate. An example of this is that the neurons and electrons in harmony helps the body lose fat to keep ideal weight. Seven to eight hours of sleep a night will help people not to get Alzheimer's, and it also improves the percent chance of never getting diabetes. This is why half of the population with the most sleep, has less physical diseases.

            If dreams can help physical disease, can they help emotional disease? The first part of the night is stage one sleep. Where the brain is dreaming and the body is in deep sleep. The second part in stage two. This part of the night is where the brain betters the memory and skills. These together make REM sleep. The first part of sleep helps people cope with emotions and change. The definition of dream is a series of thoughts that occurred throughout the day. Dreams are emotions that you want to feel or, you are feeling. It helps your brain because it doesn't have that much to think about. The brain needs its down time to just relax and not have to worry about school, bullies, and other things. Dreams aren't just good for the brain, it's also good for you. Where do dreams come from? Are they reflexes of a the brain, or a piece of your imagination? Scientists have been studying this for year, they stick electrodes to most parts of people's bodies, and measure the brain waves. These brain waves can show where the dream starts from, but it can not tell us what the dream is or how it started. People around the globe know that a dream formulates in a part of the brain called a brain stem. Knowing this has helped scientists perform amazing experiments since then.

          Dreams and sleep are great, but getting to sleep is a different story. My memory of not getting to sleep is I was very uncomfortable, hot, and awake because of my electronics. There are many things that you could do to get to sleep faster. The best one is to probably do a long, strenuous workouts urging the day, and then take a nice hot bath to relax the muscles. Before taking the hot bath, keeping the bed cool will trick the brain so that it will think that the body is in a dark, quiet place preparing itself for sleep. This will not work if the body has all the lights off. Having the lights off will help the brain think that the body is in a dark and quiet place. If the body is looking at an electronic too long before bed, the eyes will have something called retinal memory. Retinal memory is when cones in the back of the eye make light appear when our eye lids are shut causing us to have headaches which delays sleep. Another thing that tricks the senses is a nice scent in the room. When the body is in its quiet place, the scent will make the brain feel like it is a nice, quiet place instead of being in a scary, nightmare. If none of these ideas work, the most popular one is to count sheep backward from 300. These are great methods to help anybody to get to sleep.

          We could have fewer accidents every day if people put down the papers and pens, and went to bed for at least seven hours. Seventy million people only get around four to five hours of sleep which reduces both their memory and their skills. My experience with this is if I get home late from a tennis match, or if I am not done with homework until 11:00 o'clock, I tend to be drowsy and my mind wanders off in the morning. Forty percent of the population of adults even sleep unintentionally during the day because they didn't get enough sleep during the night. Five percent of these people have slept while driving! If these bad sleep habits get to the next generation, well, that would be bad. Already 45 percent of teens today's keep during class because they sleep only five to seven hours a night. Imagine a world with accidents every day in your town because of lack of sleep. This is a world I would not want to live in.

Now that the benefits of sleep are well known, and the ways to get to sleep are well known, why can't people just do it? It's not that hard to get in bed and sleep. It's great. If we want to change the numbers, lower the percent chance of teens not getting sleep, just show people how sleep can affect a human. Do you want your heart to keep pumping and your to brain to keep thinking? Sleep!