Scientists use audio cues to guide dreams and boost creativity

Scientists can now influence what you dream about

Neuroscientists have successfully guided the content of people’s dreams in a lab. The new study from Northwestern University used audio cues to make participants dream about specific puzzles they had failed to solve earlier.

The research supports the long-held idea that REM sleep can aid creative problem-solving. It marks a significant step in testing a phenomenon that has been difficult to study because dreams are hard to control.

How the dream experiment worked

The study involved 20 participants with some experience in lucid dreaming. Each person attempted to solve a series of difficult brain teasers, with each puzzle paired with a unique soundtrack.

Most puzzles went unsolved. Participants then slept in the lab while researchers monitored their brain activity.

• During REM sleep, scientists replayed the soundtracks for half of the unsolved puzzles.
• This technique, called targeted memory reactivation (TMR), aimed to selectively reactivate those memories.
• Some participants used prearranged breathing patterns to signal they heard the cues and were working on the puzzles in their dreams.

Dreaming about a puzzle led to solving it

The audio cues had a powerful effect. 75% of participants reported dreams that included elements or ideas from the cued puzzles.

Puzzles that appeared in dreams were solved at a much higher rate after waking. Participants solved 42% of the dream-related puzzles, compared to just 17% of the others.

In 12 of the 20 participants, dreams referred more often to the cued puzzles. These participants improved their success rate on those puzzles from 20% to 40%.

The results don't prove causation

The study does not definitively prove that dreaming caused the better solutions. Other factors, like heightened curiosity about certain puzzles, could have influenced both the dreams and the performance.

Still, successfully guiding dream content is an important advance. "By learning more about how our brains are able to think creatively... we could be closer to solving the problems we want to solve," said senior author Ken Paller.

Lead author Karen Konkoly said a major surprise was how strongly the cues influenced dreams even without full lucidity. One dreamer asked a dream character for help on a cued puzzle. Another, cued with a "trees" puzzle, woke up dreaming of walking through a forest.

What this means for the future of sleep research

The team plans to use these methods to explore other possible roles of dreaming, including emotional regulation and learning. "My hope is that these findings will help move us towards stronger conclusions about the functions of dreaming," Konkoly said.

If scientists can show dreams are important for problem-solving and mental health, people may start to take them more seriously. The study, "Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep," was published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness on February 5th.