You can solve problems and make decisions in your sleep. Or can you?
Dreams have long been a favorite subject of science fiction novels and horror films — a world where someone else’s consciousness can be hacked and dreams turned into tools. But what if dream control stops being fiction and becomes the subject of serious scientific research? That’s exactly what scientists at Northwestern University in the United States set out to explore. They were interested in a real question: can dreams be used to solve problems? After all, conventional wisdom has long suggested it’s better to “sleep on” a difficult problem. The researchers decided to test whether there’s a scientific basis for this.
Lucid Dreams as a Scientific Tool
Twenty people with experience in lucid dreaming were invited to participate — a state in which a person realizes they are dreaming and is sometimes able to control what happens in the dream. Lucid dreams are actively studied today: a recent study demonstrated their potential in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease, while earlier work by the same group of scientists showed the possibility of basic communication between a sleeping person and a researcher.
Participants came to the laboratory approximately two hours before sleep and received a set of logic puzzles. Each task was accompanied by a unique musical track that played repeatedly throughout the work on it. Work was stopped when each participant had accumulated four unsolved puzzles.
After the participants fell asleep, scientists tracked sleep stages using multichannel monitoring. During REM sleep — when dreams are most vivid and intense — they played the audio tracks of two of the four unsolved puzzles. The goal was to steer the dreams toward recollection of these tasks and, possibly, their solution.
The results were impressive: 75% of participants reported at least one dream related to an unsolved puzzle. Moreover, puzzles whose sound was played during sleep and which “entered” the dream were solved in the morning or later in 42% of cases. Tasks without audio accompaniment were solved in only 17% of cases.
Playing associative music helped participants return to solving the tasks.
Examples from participants’ dream journals were almost poetic. One subject asked a dream character to help solve a puzzle — the very one whose melody was playing in their headphones. Another, who heard the track for a tree-related puzzle, woke up with an image of walking through a forest. A third participant, who was played a jungle-themed track, saw herself fishing in the middle of a tropical forest and was thinking about that specific task. Based on this, the study authors noted that dreams can be influenced by sounds even without lucidity.
New Dream Research
The authors acknowledge the limitations of the study: some solutions may have emerged after waking up rather than directly during the dream. Therefore, future experiments are planned to be designed so that results can be checked immediately after the REM phase or even to establish communication with participants directly during the dream.
In the future, scientists want to go beyond problem-solving and study the impact of dreams on learning and emotional regulation. They hope these results will help reach firmer conclusions about the functions of dreaming. If scientists can convincingly demonstrate that dreams are important for problem-solving, creativity, and emotion management, people will begin to take them seriously — as a priority for mental health.
