Researchers have shown they can achieve some control over what people are dreaming, bringing a theme that has been frequently explored in sci-fi and horror genres off the page and into the lab.
Unlike more fanciful imaginings of dream control, however, 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.
For this study, which has been published in the journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness, the test subjects arrived about two hours before bedtime and were given a series of brain-teaser puzzles to solve, which they worked on for three minutes at a time. During every puzzle that was presented, the participants heard a unique soundtrack that looped along with the name of the puzzle. Volunteers continued to work on puzzles until they had four of them that were unsolved.
Next, everyone was asked to go to bed. Based on multi-sensor monitoring, the researchers then played the soundtracks to the participants for two of the four unsolved puzzles during the REM phase of sleep, hoping to steer dreams towards a memory of, and potentially a solution for, the puzzles. What they found was that 75% of the participants reported having at least one dream that was associated with an unsolved puzzle. Additionally, puzzles that were cued and incorporated into dreams were solved either the next morning or at some point after at a 42% rate, while those that were not had only a 17% solve rate.
Fishing in the jungle
In addition to helping participants solve puzzles, the soundtrack cues also influenced their dreams in other ways.
“Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cuing,” says lead study author Karen Konkoly. “Another was cued with the ‘trees’ puzzle and woke up dreaming of walking through a forest. Another dreamer was cued with a puzzle about jungles and woke up from a dream in which she was fishing in the jungle thinking about that puzzle. These were fascinating examples to witness because they showed how dreamers can follow instructions, and dreams can be influenced by sounds during sleep, even without lucidity.”
The researchers say that one limitation of the study is that some of the problem-solving results they saw could have taken place due to post-waking cognition rather than anything explicitly worked out in the dreams. For that reason, they say, future studies should be designed to test problem solving immediately after REM sleep phases or even through communication with participants while they are dreaming. They are also considering designing future studies that go beyond dreaming’s effect on puzzle solving and plan to look at other components of dreaming such as generalized learning or emotional regulation.
“My hope is that these findings will help move us towards stronger conclusions about the functions of dreaming,” Konkoly concluded. “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.”
Source: Northwestern University
