How do I park my mind at night?

Here's an interesting awareness experiment that I like to do from time to time, and perhaps I should do it everyday but hey ho that's the way it goes.

There's a useful little gap between the end of daily activities and retiring to go to bed. Exercise some mindfulness and pay attention to what is going on: feeling tired, ready for bed, feeling agitated (this happened, then this), feeling calm, feeling alert, feeling sad, feeling frustrated, feeling stressed, and so on. Interestingly, we take these mind states into bed with us when we go to sleep. Armed with this knowledge, we might like to inject some pleasantness into proceedings. We all have our different ideas of pleasantness but we might like arouse some sensual pleasure or pick out a pleasant area of the mind to pay attention to. We might become distracted by our usual thinking habits, but try to stay with the good times. Notice the pleasurable feeling and hang your mind there for as long as you can. Stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, and then go and brush your teeth. Consider yourself ready.