Have you ever credited your dreams or a good night’s sleep with helping you find the solution to one of life’s many problems? Well, as it turns out, research out today backs up the idea that our slumbering hours can truly spark sudden new insight.
Neuroscientists at Northwestern University recruited lucid dreamers for a “dream engineering” experiment. They found it was possible to nudge people into dreaming about puzzles they failed to solve while awake; what’s more, those who dreamt about these puzzles were more likely to solve them when they woke up. Though the findings alone don’t yet prove the concept of sleep-fueled inspiration, the team’s novel technique could help scientists start to unravel the many remaining questions about dreaming and sleep.
“The results of their study demonstrate the potential of altering dream content with experimental manipulations such as this one,” Philip Gehrman, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not affiliated with the study, told Gizmodo.
The dream weavers
For years, Northwestern researchers led by cognitive neuroscientist Ken Paller have been working to expand the boundaries of dream research.
The team’s previous experiments showed that people can be trained to have lucid dreams, even with something as simple as a phone app. Even more impressive, they’ve seemingly communicated with sleeping people using external sensory cues, typically sounds or smells. These cues are intentionally paired to memories of words or concepts intended to be reinforced during people’s sleep, particularly their REM sleep, the stage associated with dreams and memory consolidation. The process is called targeted memory reactivation (TMR).
The researchers have been studying various applications of trained lucid dreaming and TMR, including pairing it with therapy as a way to reduce people’s nightmares. One such use, they argue, would be allowing scientists to empirically test assumptions about the nature of sleep, including the idea that we often work out problems while dreaming.
“A big reason that it’s difficult to causally claim that dreams help people solve problems is because most of the time, people dream about problems that were already on their mind for a while. They probably thought about that problem while awake, and while falling asleep, and processed it unconsciously during non-REM sleep, before they had a dream that provided them with insight,” lead study author Karen Konkoly, a postdoctoral researcher at Paller’s lab, told Gizmodo. “All these processing steps beforehand make it difficult to isolate the specific contribution of our dreams in REM sleep for creative problem solving.”
The team’s answer to this particular conundrum is something they’ve coined as “dream engineering,” or more plainly, “interactive dreaming.”
Dream puzzle solving
This latest experiment involved 20 people with past experience in lucid dreaming.
The volunteers were brought to the lab and asked to solve intentionally perplexing puzzles, each with a three-minute time limit, before tucking in for the night under close observation. All of the puzzles were paired with sound cues, and many went unsolved before bed. When the volunteers reached periods of REM sleep, the researchers played cues from 50% of the unsolved puzzles (the selection of the puzzles was randomly determined), and the volunteers were told to try solving a puzzle in their dream if they heard its cue.
The team was successful at priming some volunteers to have specific dreams, though not everyone reported having a lucid or cued dream during the night. Overall, three-fourths of people reported having dreams linked to any of the unsolved puzzles, and 12 participants reported having more puzzle-related dreams specifically linked to the sounds played during the night. Some even communicated their awareness of the cue during their lucid dream, with previously agreed bodily signals like sniffing.
The researchers found that when people reported incorporating a puzzle in their dreams, they were better able to solve that puzzle once they woke up (a 42% solve rate vs. 17% of non-incorporated dreams). And among the 12 dreamers who had more cued dreams, they had an easier time solving puzzles that were reactivated during their slumber (a 40% solve rate compared to 20% of non-cued puzzles). A few people also reported having non-lucid dreams that nonetheless were still linked to the sound cues.
“Interestingly, even though individuals in this study rarely thought of the solutions during their dreams, even just having a dream incorporating aspects of the puzzle made them more likely to solve it the next morning,” Konkoly said.
The team’s findings were published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.
The future of dream research
As fascinating as this study is, both the authors and Gehrman are quick to caution we still can’t definitively say that our dreams let us tackle the questions that haunt our waking lives.
“The results point in the direction of a link between REM and creative problem solving, but are far from conclusive,” Gehrman said. “One issue is not knowing whether what you find in lucid dreamers is applicable to non-lucid dreamers.”
That real caveat aside, Konkoly and her colleagues are optimistic about using the combination of TMR and interactive dreaming to help solve the many mysteries surrounding our dreams. For her next immediate project, she plans to explore why people can only sometimes respond to cues during sleep but not others.
“There are so many hypotheses about how dreams may help us, from processing emotional memories to helping us derive meaning from what we learned so we can apply it in the future,” she said. “By using new methods to influence dream content in real time, we can start to test these hypotheses and move towards a more unified understanding of the functions of dreaming.”
In the meantime, if you’re ever dealing with a vexing question, it just might be worthwhile to try sleeping on it.
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