A team led by researchers from Northwestern University has used certain sounds to prompt sleeping volunteers to dream about specific unsolved puzzles. Even more interestingly, study participants for whom the prompts worked proved more likely to be able to solve those same puzzles upon waking.
Dream Engineering
This new research shows evidence that dreams can be manipulated and then used to solve real-world problems.
“Many problems in the world today require creative solutions,” says psychologist Ken Paller from Northwestern University.
“By learning more about how our brains are able to think creatively, think anew, and generate creative new ideas, we could be closer to solving the problems we want to solve, and sleep engineering could help.”
For the experiment, researchers recruited 20 participants, most of whom were lucid dreamers or regularly able to realize they’re dreaming during dream sequences. They were tasked to complete a series of tough puzzles, each with a specific soundtrack accompanying it.
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Then, during the sleep part of the study, researchers attempted to prompt dreams by playing the soundtracks for some of the puzzles. The 12 participants whose dreams the researchers targeted with prompts reported that their dreams involved puzzles more often than not. And, among that group, their subsequent problem-solving ability the next day went up from 20 percent to 40 percent.
The subsequent solving rate for puzzles that had appeared in dreams was 42 percent, as opposed to 17 percent for people who hadn’t dreamed of the puzzles.
After having study participants recount what happened in their dreams, researchers also found evidence that their unconscious minds were focused on trying to solve the puzzles. For example, one participant recalled asking a dream character for help with a puzzle. Another participant was cued with a “trees puzzle” and woke dreaming of walking through a forest.
“My hope is that these findings will help move us towards stronger conclusions about the functions of dreaming,” says Konkoly.
“If scientists can definitively say that dreams are important for problem solving, creativity, and emotion regulation, hopefully people will start to take dreams seriously as a priority for mental health and wellbeing.”
The research has been published in Neuroscience of Consciousness.
