Stuck on a puzzle? Sleeping may help you solve it, study finds |
Humans have long believed that dreams could be a source of creativity and a means to solving problems. It is often said that many famous ideas were inspired by dreams. Nevertheless, scientists have found it difficult to demonstrate this in a clear way. Most of the previous research depended on autobiographies or vague associations, so it is quite unclear if the dreams really brought about the creative insights or if it was just the brain resting.The foremost issue is that dreams are inherently hard to study. If a person is able to solve a problem after sleeping, the question arises as to whether the answer was derived from the dream, from unconscious brain processes, or from regular thinking upon waking. As a result, there has been a lack of firm evidence that dreams alone have a direct impact on people’s ability to solve problems.
Sleep and dreams improved problem-solving in controlled experiments
To address this issue, researchers focused on people who frequently have lucid dreams. These are dreams where a person realises they are dreaming while still asleep. Lucid dreamers can sometimes control their thoughts and actions inside a dream, making them useful for studying what happens during dreaming itself.The researchers wanted to see whether dreams could be guided toward specific problems and whether this would improve problem-solving later. Participants were given several puzzles to solve while awake. Each puzzle was paired with a unique sound. Some puzzles were easy, but others could not be solved and were left unfinished.After this, participants went to sleep in a laboratory. They were told that if they heard a puzzle sound during a dream, they should try to work on that puzzle while dreaming.
How dreams were influenced during REM sleep
During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the stage when vivid dreams usually happen, researchers quietly played the sounds linked to some of the unsolved puzzles. Other puzzle sounds were not played. This allowed the researchers to compare puzzles that were cued during sleep with those that were not.According to the study “Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep”, this method worked. The sounds increased the chance that participants dreamed about the matching puzzles. In some cases, participants even signalled in real time that they were thinking about a puzzle while still asleep.
What happened after waking up
The next morning, participants tried to solve the puzzles again. The key result was simple. Puzzles that appeared in dreams were more likely to be solved than puzzles that did not appear in dreams.Just hearing a sound in a dream was not enough. What mattered was actually dreaming about the puzzle itself. Not everyone responded in the same way. Some participants clearly dreamed more about the puzzles that were cued during sleep. In this group, the cued puzzles were solved much more often. Other participants did not show this pattern, and for them the sounds made little difference.This suggests that dream-guided problem-solving works better for some people than others.Lucid dreams were not always betterInterestingly, lucid dreams were not always more helpful than normal dreams. In some cases, puzzles that appeared in non-lucid dreams were solved more often.This suggests that unconscious dreaming may sometimes be better for creativity, possibly because the brain is freer to make unusual connections without deliberate effort.
What this study cannot fully explain
The study had limitations. The number of participants was small. Some dreams were forgotten. It is also possible that people thought about the puzzles after waking up, not only during dreams.Despite these limits, the results still point strongly toward a role for dreaming in creative problem-solving. This study provides some of the strongest experimental evidence so far that dreams during REM sleep can help people solve problems. It also shows that dream content can be guided in controlled ways.Together, these findings suggest that dreams are not just random stories but can actively support creativity and problem-solving, opening new paths for future research.
