If you have COVID-19, you could__36__ it to others, even if you do not have symptoms. When you have symptoms, get tested and stay home until you have your__37__. If you have tested__38__(even without symptoms), follow the __39__ recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You would need to stay home and away from others for at least 5 days (possibly more, depending on how the virus affects you) and wearing a highquality,__40__mask when indoors around others for a period of time.

       It is believed that dreams sometimes help us solve problems. It is also proposed that a critical aspect of dreaming lies in the processing of memories.

       Researcher Erin Wamsley designed a study in which participants explored a virtual maze, trying to learn its layout. Then she let them take a 90-minute nap. After their nap, she asked them whether they remembered dreaming about the task and then tested them on the maze again. The results were astonishing. Participants who had no memory of dreaming about the task took, on average, one and a half minutes longer to find their way out of the maze after their naps. However, those who reported that they had dreamed about it found their way out two and a half minutes faster than before. Erin then repeated the experiment by actually waking subjects to collect dream reports and identify those whose dreams were related to the task. She found that the latter showed almost 10 times more improvement after their naps compared with the participants who reported no related dreams.

       What exactly did they dream about? One participant reported: “I was thinking about the maze…, and then that led me to a cave trip I had a few years ago. The cave is maze-like.” Another recalled hearing the music played in the background while exploring the maze.

       Dreams like these seemed unlikely to help participants enhance their memories of the maze’s layout. And yet they were reported by the very participants who showed the greatest improvement. The sleeping brain was both enhancing its memory of the maze layout and creating related dreams. So, these dreams must be serving some other function. But what?

       Perhaps some strategy you learned while exploring a cave will help you the next time you try the maze task. Conversely, maybe something you learned from the maze task will help you next time you’re down in a cave. Your brain suddenly realizes, hey, exploring mazes and caves is really the same thing. It is a perfect example of the function of dreaming that researchers like Erin Wamsley propose: the extraction of new knowledge from existing information through the discovery of unexpected associations.