It’s late in the evening: time to close the book and turn off the computer. You’re done for the day. What you may not realize, _______, is that the learning process actually continues - in your dreams.

It might sound like science fiction, but researchers are increasingly _______ the relationship between the knowledge and skills our brains absorb during the day and the fragmented, often bizarre imaginings they _______ at night. Scientists have found that dreaming about a task we’ve learned is associated with _______ performance in that activity (suggesting that there’s some truth to the popular notion that we’re “getting” a foreign language once we begin dreaming in it). What’s more, researchers are coming to recognize that dreaming is an essential part of understanding, organizing and _______ what we learn. While we sleep, research indicates, the brain replays the patterns of activity it experienced during _______ hours, allowing us to enter what one psychologist calls a neural virtual reality. A vivid example of such _______ can be seen in a video researchers made recently about sleep disorders. They taught a series of dance moves to a group of patients with conditions like sleepwalking, in which the sleeper performs the kind of physical movement that does not _______ occur during sleep. They then videotaped the _______ as they slept. Lying in bed, eyes closed, one female patient on the tape __________ the dance moves she learned earlier.

This shows that while our bodies are __________, our brains are drawing what’s important from the information and events we’ve recently encountered, then integrating that data into the vast __________ of what we already know.

In a 2010 study, researchers at Harvard Medical School reported that college students who dreamed about a computer maze(迷宫)task they had learned showed a 10-fold improvement in their __________ to find their way through the maze compared with the participants who did not dream about the task.

Robert Stick-gold, one of the Harvard researchers, suggests that studying right before bedtime or taking a nap following a study session in the afternoon might increase the __________ of dreaming about the material. Think about that as your head __________ the pillow tonight.