Sleep, Slept, and Sleeping are actually different tenses. Sleep is the present tense, slept the past, and sleeping is actually the gerund (remember, the ...ing words?).

Each tense conjugates, so in English we would say either I sleep, you sleep, he/she/it sleeps, we sleep, you (plural) sleep, they sleep for the present tense, or I slept, etc, for the past tense which is also called the preterite. There is also an imperfect tense, for I was sleeping, etc. In English, we need the verb "to be" plus gerund to form the imperfect, e.g. "I was" plus "sleeping". In spanish, this is not the case, but there is a different conjugation for that.

If you are looking at a Spanish website or book, the tenses are as follows:

Present: Presente
Future: Futuro
Imperfect: Imperfecto
Past (preterite): Pretérito
Perfect (e.g. I have ...ed): Presente perfecto
Future perfect (e.g. I will have ...ed): Futuro perfecto
Pluperfect (e.g. I had ...ed): Pluscuamperfecto

These are all the tenses for the indicative mood, the mood we use every day to state fact. There are other moods too, e.g. conditional, subjunctive, imperative.

A verb has five properties:
person - e.g. 1st person
number - e.g. singular or plural
voice - active or passive
tense - e.g. present, preterite, future ...
mood - e.g. indicative, conditional, subjunctive ...

Will stop there for the moment ...

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