Could dream manipulation help us solve real life problems?

 

Your competent? doctor should have been all over this by creating lucid dreaming protocols! With lucid dreaming you can see action observation of your own movements. I would do running.  The rest of the article is behind a paywall.

Your doctor should have been familiar with galantamine for a decade already

• galantamine (5 posts to August 2013)

A drug's weird side effect lets people control their dreams

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Could dream manipulation help us solve real life problems?

The organisation of the Periodic Table, Paul McCartney's song Yesterday, and the main scenes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein reportedly all sprang from insights that arose during dreams. Some studies have also strengthened the idea that spontaneously dreaming of a problem you're facing can lead to creative solutions.

However, evidence that deliberately manipulating dreams can foster creative problem-solving has been lacking, write the authors of a recent paper in the Neuroscience of Consciousness. In their study, though, Karen R Konkoly at Northwestern University and colleagues report findings that suggest that indeed it can.

The researchers recruited 20 participants who reported having a lucid dream at least once per month. During a lucid dream, the sleeper reports being aware that they are dreaming, and they can often influence or even control the content of their dreams.  

On two separate occasions, a week apart, each participant came into the lab for an overnight sleep study. They arrived at around 10pm, and attempted a series of difficult brain-teaser type puzzles until there were four left that they just couldn't solve. Importantly for the study, during each puzzle, the team played a specific eight to twelve-second long snippet of sound, and they made sure that the participants had learned which soundtrack went with which test.

The participant then went to sleep in the lab. While they slept, their brain activity and other physiological signals, including eye movements and muscle activity, were monitored using polysomnography.

At 4am, an experimenter woke them and used a method called Targeted Lucidity Reactivation to try to encourage lucid dreaming during their next bout of REM sleep. This technique involves pairing specific sounds with a lucid state of mind as the individual allows themself to fall asleep. When the polysomnography signals indicated that they had entered REM sleep, the researchers used TLR sound signals to try to trigger a lucid dream, then played the soundtracks to two of their four unsolved puzzles.

After the team finished presenting the cues or when the REM period ended, whichever was sooner, they woke the participant and asked them if they had heard the sound cues or anything that related to the puzzles during their dream, before allowing them to fall back to sleep. At 9am that morning, the participants were then given four minutes to work on each of the four unsolved puzzles again.

When the team analysed the data, they found that while many of the participants did not experience a lucid dream, three quarters dreamed about elements of unsolved puzzles, or ideas relating to those puzzles, at some point during the night. Also, when this happened, these particular puzzles were solved far more often the following morning. In fact, after waking, the participants solved 42% of puzzles that had appeared in some way during dreams, compared with 17% of the puzzles that had not.

The study does suffer from a few drawbacks. One is that it tested only one particular type of creativity: identifying one correct response from many alternatives. Also, all the participants were lucid dreamers; it's possible that this group has some quality that may make them respond differently to dream manipulations than those of us who don't lucid dream.

Another shortcoming is that the study can't prove that dreaming about a puzzle directly increased the chance of a creative solution. It's possible that when a participant was more interested in a particular puzzle, they were not only more likely to dream about it, but they also thought about it more before and after waking, and this waking activity might have helped them to solve it.

Still, the findings "support the conclusion that dreaming in REM sleep can contribute to creative problem solving," the team writes. And the study does demonstrate a method to influence the content of a person's dreams. They now plan to use this 'targeted memory reactivation' to explore in more detail the roles of REM dreams not just for problem-solving but also in emotional regulation as well as broader types of learning.

Read the paper in full:
Schredl, M., & Erlacher, D. (2007). Self-Reported Effects of Dreams on Waking-Life Creativity: An Empirical Study. The Journal of Psychology, 141(1), 35–46. https://doi.org/10.3200/jrlp.141.1.35-46

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