A recent study found that dreaming about a specific problem can help you find creative solutions the next day. By playing special audio to participants while they slept, scientists were able to guide the content of their dreams to unsolved puzzles and increase their success in solving subsequent problems. These findings were published in the journal neuroscience of consciousness.
Scientists have observed that taking a break from difficult problems tends to help us find solutions. Once a person leaves, attachment to the wrong approach begins to disappear. At the same time, the brain may form new and unexpected connections between the problem and existing knowledge.
Sleep seems to be the ideal state for this kind of creative restructuring. Historical anecdotes and research studies suggest that dreams serve as a source of creative insight. This is especially true for dreams that occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of the sleep cycle most closely associated with vivid dreams.
Despite this historical account, direct evidence that dreaming causes creative breakthroughs has proven difficult to find. Previous studies have mainly relied on observational data. This means that scientists could only show a correlation between remembering dreams and solving problems later.
This correlation leaves open the possibility that other factors caused both the dream and the final resolution. For example, people with high levels of motivation may naturally dream about a problem and then put more effort into solving it the next day. To establish a clearer connection, researchers needed a way to control the content of dreams without waking people up.
“We wanted to test the theory that dreams during REM sleep promote creative problem-solving. The link between dreams in REM sleep and problem-solving is supported primarily by anecdotal evidence, and we sought to use novel techniques in dream engineering to directly test this theory,” said study author Karen Concoly, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge who conducted the research while at Northwestern University.
The researchers used a technique called targeted memory reactivation. This method involves combining a learning task with sensory stimulation, such as sound, while the person is awake. If you then play the same cue while the person is sleeping, their memory for that task will be strengthened.
The researchers applied the technique to 20 adults, focusing primarily on people who frequently experience lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a state in which a sleeping person is aware that he or she is dreaming and may be able to control the dream story.
During the evening laboratory session, participants attempted to solve various brain teaser puzzles. These included matchstick, space, and word puzzles designed to require creative thinking rather than a simple step-by-step approach. Before starting each puzzle, participants listened to a unique 15-second musical or environmental soundtrack to build associations. Participants were given three minutes to work on each puzzle while a specific soundtrack played in the background.
The experimenter gave participants real-time feedback on the proposed solutions during this evening session. Participants continued this process until they had exactly four unsolved puzzles that night. The scientists then placed sensors on the participants’ heads and faces to monitor their brain waves, eye movements, and muscle activity.
Participants then slept in the lab for the first half of the night. At 4 a.m., the researchers woke the participants briefly and conducted a short training session designed to promote lucid dreaming as they returned to sleep.
Once the monitoring device indicated that the participant had entered rapid eye movement sleep, the researchers quietly played the soundtrack associated with two of the participant’s four unsolved puzzles. The sound was kept at a low volume to avoid waking sleeping participants.
Participants were instructed to listen to these sounds in their dreams before going to sleep. Once they realized they were dreaming and heard the puzzle soundtrack, they were told to signal the real-world researchers. They did this by sniffing out specific patterns of quick comings and goings. This sniffing movement can be detected by recording devices even while the body is paralyzed during sleep. The researchers woke participants after these targeted sleep stages and asked them to report detailed dreams.
“This is a relatively new method of communication that is commonly used at Northwestern University and has been found to be a great way to communicate with people who are sleeping,” Konkoly told SciPost. “It was also fascinating to see how dreamers respond to cues and let us know what problems they’re working on during sleep, but by the time they wake up they forget the details. We feel like real-time communication allows us to rescue information about dreams that the dreamers themselves have forgotten.”
The next morning, participants were given another chance to solve the previous night’s puzzle. Scientists have discovered that sound cues can successfully influence the content of dreams. Puzzles with clues appeared in dreams much more often than puzzles that were not combined with nighttime sounds.
In total, 15 of 20 participants reported at least one dream that conceptually included elements of an unresolved puzzle. The puzzles that appeared in these dreams were much more likely to be solved the next day. On average, participants solved 42% of the conceptually dreamed puzzles.
Only 17% of the non-dream puzzles were solved. Notably, simply hearing sounds in dreams without incorporating puzzle concepts did not improve solving rates. Sound cues do not automatically increase problem-solving success for everyone.
“‘Dream engineering’ allows people to be reminded of specific unresolved problems while they sleep, and if they dream about the problem the night before, they are more likely to solve the problem,” Konkoly said. “This study provides preliminary causal evidence that dreaming may promote creative problem solving.”
This technique worked very well for a subgroup of 12 participants whose dreams were heavily influenced by sound. For these particular individuals, the sound cues doubled their problem-solving success rate for puzzles with clues compared to puzzles without clues. Conscious awareness during dreaming was not always necessary for success.
Participants were more likely to actually solve puzzles after regularly having non-lucid dreams. Some people responded to the auditory cues of the sniffling signal during sleep, but when they woke up, they could not remember the dream. Even when they didn’t remember their dreams, participants continued to solve the puzzles at a high rate.
“What was most surprising was that the cues we presented during sleep successfully influenced non-lucid dreams,” Konkoly said. “Even without realizing they were dreaming, some dreamers seemed to follow our instructions, for example by asking other dream characters to help them solve the sonic puzzles we presented them with.”
“Many problems in today’s world require creative solutions. Learning more about how our brains are able to think creatively, rethink, and generate creative new ideas can bring us closer to solving the problems we want to solve, and sleep engineering may help,” said lead author Ken Paler, James Padilla Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
However, the audio cues did not universally promote problem solving across groups. The researchers were unable to definitively establish a direct sequence of events for all participants, as the nighttime sounds only improved puzzle solving for participants who successfully incorporated the cues into their dreams.
This study is also based on a relatively small sample size. The statistical power of the findings was limited because participants worked on only four unsolved puzzles per night. Future experiments with larger numbers of participants and more diverse tasks will help confirm these effects.
It also remains difficult to distinguish between the exact moment of a dream and the unconscious mental processing that occurs afterwards. People can dream about puzzles and continue processing that information unconsciously until they wake up. Determining exactly when creative insight occurs remains a challenge.
The researchers also noted that their study focused on convergent creativity, which involves finding a single correct answer to a particular problem. Future research could investigate whether dreaming also promotes diverse creativity, which involves generating many novel ideas and alternative uses for everyday objects. Scientists also plan to investigate why some people incorporate sound into their dreams while others block it out.
“I’m interested in using methods like this to test other hypothesized functions of dreaming,” Konkoly said. “Furthermore, I personally found it very interesting to spend many nights presenting clues to participants and observing how they became incorporated into dreams, some vertically, some in subtle or distorted ways, some ignored all together. How can the same stimulus be perceived in such different ways in the same state of consciousness?”
The study, “Creative problem solving after experimentally inducing dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep,” was authored by Karen R Konkoly, Daniel J Morris, Kaitlyn Hurka, Alysiana M Martinez, Kristin EG Sanders, and Ken A Paller.
