Well we know that you can fill your mental inventories with curiosities and sleep em for days without worry (or log off), but what if we add additional features to "when you sleep with the curiosities in mind"?
We dream.
Depending on the curiosity, we dream about them, we get good dreams... Or bad dreams...
Good dreams gives you buffs, bad dreams gives you debuffs.
And the dream phases will only stop appearing randomly, if you stop studying the related curiosities.
Example:
Ants:
Good = You dreamt you were an ant, working hard for your ant colony.
Bad = You get a nightmare of giant ants, picking you up and studying you, prodding you.