Sleep, is forgetting one's place

You can't tell yourself or anyone one thing you were thinking yesterday, and that means "verbatim", start to finish. Watch it now, or you'll lie to yourself about that, though the correct way to say that (to understand that) is: your brain would be fooling you. 

Saying you were "thinking about your aunt mary or uncle fred", is NOT saying WHAT you were thinking yesterday, verbatim, only the "subject matter"... and almost anyone alive can "do" that. It's just another case of "B.F.D." But to be really significant, one must be able say "B.F.D." to oneself, with understanding. And if you are "one of those types" who believe they CAN say what they were thinking yesterday, verbatim, then they are not doing This Work, or ANY Work. They're still deeply in imagination about all of it... but then, hey, they have LOTS of company! (Many billions of them at last count!)

The conscious part of the brain (or mind, as most would call it, usually preferring to say "MY mind") - where consciousness is active in one, where one can think about thoughts, ideas, concepts, actions, and talk about it - has no memory of itself or what it does, outside a very short window of possibility, not fixed in anyone but fairly knowable from active observation over a long time. Within that short period (6, 12, or 24 hours or so), it either becomes semi-permanent, or disappears entirely. 

The conscious part of the brain only has memories of bodily - sensory, physical - experiences, but no memory of its own functioning. That's why you can remember for months some physical experience in all detail, but can not remember for more than a day or so, some extremely lucid mental experience. You have been "thinking" non-stop for decades, yet you have no memories of any of it, except, perhaps, for those rare "enlightenments", that some people have, and spend the rest of their lives remembering, in thoughts, the mental experience. Surely everyone realizes that even though other people read them, over and over, NONE get enlightened, though they both may enjoy reading them.

The mind can remember only that which has a physical component, 

never when only a mental one.

Sleep, is forgetting one's place, in the Grand Scheme of Life in general, in the grand scheme of one's own life in particular, in the grand scheme of time's unfolding hour after hour, and in the grand scheme of thought trying to wrap experience in order to remember one own Life.

If you are just one of the billions 

who enjoy their sleep, and 

their fictional mental life, more than 

Seeking an Awakened Life, 

then the joke is on you.