In the Hollywood blockbuster Inception (2010), a dedicated team of “dream extractors” is hired to manipulate dreams to change the decisions of CEOs. In the movie, the feat involves a private jet and several liters of sedative gas, but new research suggests a similar effect could have been achieved with just the sound of steel drums and a comfortable bed in a lab.
This new study shows that audio cues played to sleeping volunteers during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of sleep where most dreams occur, can manipulate the content of dreams.
you may like
“Go to sleep with that.”
When you’re stuck with a problem, people often advise you to “go to sleep and solve the problem.” And there’s some scientific evidence to support this, said study co-author Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University. For example, in one 2012 study, volunteers who were asked to solve association-based problems performed better after sleeping than another group who stayed awake.
However, it was unclear how sleep accomplishes this.
“The motivation for this study was to see if dreaming was associated with the benefits of sleep for problem-solving,” Paller told Live Science.
Paller’s team recruited 20 participants who reported having experience with or an interest in lucid dreaming (a dream state in which the sleeper is aware that they are dreaming and can have some control over their dreams).
Before dozing off in the lab, these participants were tasked with solving puzzles that tested their creative cognition within a certain time limit. These included tasks in which volunteers had to modify a matchstick diagram to move a limited number of sticks to create a specific shape.
A short soundtrack was played while volunteers considered each puzzle. The melody was unique to each challenge. These themes included guitar riffs, whistling songs, and steel drum songs. The puzzles were so difficult that each participant was left with several unsolved puzzles by the end of the test.
you may like
Study lead author Karen Konkoly, who worked on the project while researching dreams in Paller’s lab, also taught volunteers certain eye movements, with the idea that if participants were lucid dreaming, they would use their eye movements to tell researchers.
The researchers then placed electrodes on the participants’ scalps and measured their brain activity and eye movements while they slept. Participants were able to watch “Inception” or “Waking Life” (2001), another film about lucid dreaming, while the electrodes were applied.
A few hours later, as the volunteers entered REM sleep, Conkoly and his team began playing the soundtrack associated with the puzzle they had been unable to solve. Immediately afterwards, participants were woken up and asked to record their dreams in a diary. Participants then recorded their dreams over the next two weeks and spent another night in the lab solving puzzles.
Three-quarters of volunteers reported having dreams related to unsolved puzzles, and the data suggested that researchers were more likely to dream about puzzles to which they had given audio cues. When the six dreamers listened to the puzzle soundtrack, they signaled to Conkoly that they were lucid by moving their eyes in preset patterns and changing their breathing.
The next day, all the volunteers tried the puzzle again. Results were mixed.
If a particular unsolved puzzle appeared in a volunteer’s dream, the volunteer was more likely to solve that puzzle the next day compared to a puzzle he or she did not dream about. Volunteers solved 42% of the puzzles they dreamed about, but only 17% of the puzzles they didn’t dream about.
Does lucid dreaming help or hinder?
However, this finding does not conclusively prove that dreams can help solve puzzles. It is possible that the volunteers were simply dreaming about the puzzles they were most interested in and most likely to solve at baseline.
To the authors’ surprise, volunteers whose eye movements suggested they had lucid dreams were less likely to solve the puzzles than those who had non-lucid dreams about the puzzles. Paler said the study’s small sample size may have produced this effect.
“I don’t think we had enough lucid dreaming to really be sure of that,” he said.
Emma Peters, a dream engineer at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, said the main topic in the field was whether lucid dreaming could actually impair creative thinking compared to non-lucid dreaming.
“The idea is that you can do creative problem solving in dreams, because dreams are so strange and trigger associations that you wouldn’t normally make if you were consciously there,” she said.
For Paller, the interpretation of dream research faces another important limitation. It is in other parts of the sleep cycle where dreams occur less frequently. At this point, we cannot exclude the possibility that brain activity at these stages is the driving force behind creative thinking. The downstream consequences of that thought may appear in remembered dreams.
However, the field is gradually uncovering what happens inside the sleeping brain. For Paller, these unsolved mysteries are what continue to inspire the science of dreams.
“I think science is fun when there’s still something we need to understand and we’re not there,” he said.
KR Konkoly, DJ Morris, K. Hulka, AM Martinez, KE Saunders, KA Paller (2026). Creative problem solving after experimentally inducing dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2026(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf067
Source link
