Whenever I explain the basic Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation the first time during our retreats, I tell our retreatants that if a person does develop more compassion, more love and more peacefulness in their daily life, then benefits will come to that person. And, according to the scriptures as well as from my experience, some of the benefits are that a person falls asleep easily, they wake up easily and they dream few if any unpleasant dreams. However, we don't guarantee it's going to happen that night. It doesn't always work that fast.
When a person is having trouble sleeping, often they're agitated, they're worried, they're afraid, they're thinking too much about tomorrow, or this or that. It's way too involved to explain for this question-and-answer period, but a lot of our practice -- as with the body awareness and the Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation is going to help us reduce our stress, find a more peaceful mind.
Now even for people who are very calm and peaceful, there will be times when they simply can't sleep; their minds are spinning, there's something too busy in their life. So there are some basic things that we tell people if they're having a lot of trouble sleeping. One is, get up. Don't stay lying in bed if you're having trouble sleeping. You've already been there for an hour and are awake. Get up, even if it's only to go to the bathroom and come back. The change of posture often causes a shift in the mind. A little bit of walking meditation can do wonders -- ten minutes, fifteen minutes; often that helps. If there is noise associated with your lack of sleep, if you're actually thinking, "Oh, those people make lots and lots of noise," and that's a worry going on, part of the mindfulness practice that we teach is to be more aware of listening as to just a sound instead of putting a story around it. Again, that's a little too much for now. But there are different ways that we explain and, by all means, if you're really serious about learning a lot of this, we're only a thousand kilometers away, up in Thailand. And the monastery is a beautiful place to come and do a retreat with us.