Amazing stuff! I don't believe we have made much progress on dream research since the days when individuals would lay down to tell Sigmund Freud what they dreamed about lately! 😊
"Researchers have shown they can achieve some control over what people are dreaming ...
researchers at Northwestern University (NU) were particularly interested in finding out if they could harness dreams to work with the idea that sleeping on a problem can help people solve it.
So they recruited 20 people who were experienced in lucid dreaming, the ability to recognize that you're dreaming from within a dream and sometimes control what happens. Another dream-related study released this month showed that lucid dreams might be able to help with mental health therapy for conditions like PTSD and Parkinson's disease, and previous work with researchers from NU and other institutes showed a simple type of communication was possible between lucid dreamers and test administrators. ..."
"... A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep — the rapid eye movement phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur — may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem. ..."
From the abstract:
"Dreams have arguably been a source of creative insight for millennia. The specific assertion that dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep promote creative problem-solving, however, has only anecdotal support, lacking strong empirical support from rigorous studies. Experimental manipulations of dream content have been confounded by waking components, such that any boost in creative problem-solving could be attributable to waking cognition rather than sleep cognition. Likewise, correlational evidence cannot unequivocally establish that dreams cause insights. Evidence that memory reactivation during sleep promotes creative problem-solving is also insufficient for implicating dreaming per se. Better methods for directly manipulating REM-sleep dreaming are needed. Here, we studied individuals who frequently have lucid dreams—realizing they are dreaming while still asleep. Participants slept after failing to solve several puzzles that had unique soundtracks, and they were instructed to continue working on a puzzle if they heard its soundtrack in a dream. Half of the soundtracks were played during REM sleep to reactivate memories of corresponding puzzles, with the goal of biasing dreams to connect with those specific puzzles versus the remaining puzzles. Those sound cues reliably increased dreaming about the associated puzzles. Furthermore, a post-hoc analysis showed that, for participants with an increase in cue-related dreaming, cues boosted later puzzle-solving. We thus expanded on a well-known phenomenon, that sounds can be incorporated into dreams and can change dream content, by substantiating experimental procedures to align dreams with the search for creative answers to specific challenges. Results highlight that REM dreams can contribute to next-day problem solving."
Dream engineering can help solve ‘puzzling’ questions "Study offers insights to optimizing sleep for creativity"
Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep (open access)
Fig. 1 Experimental timeline.
(A) Overview of experimental timeline for most participants.
(B) Each in-lab session had an identical procedure, except with different puzzles. Lucid dreams were induced with targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR).
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