creative problem solving lucid dreams

Dreams and creative problem-solving

Affiliation.

1 Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
PMID: 28640937
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.13412

Dreams have produced art, music, novels, films, mathematical proofs, designs for architecture, telescopes, and computers. Dreaming is essentially our brain thinking in another neurophysiologic state-and therefore it is likely to solve some problems on which our waking minds have become stuck. This neurophysiologic state is characterized by high activity in brain areas associated with imagery, so problems requiring vivid visualization are also more likely to get help from dreaming. This article reviews great historical dreams and modern laboratory research to suggest how dreams can aid creativity and problem-solving.

Keywords: REM sleep; creativity; dream incubation; dreams; problem-solving.

Publication types

Brain / physiology*
Creativity*
Dreams / physiology*
Dreams / psychology*
Problem Solving / physiology*

Arts on the Brain

Emory undergrads experience & explore!

Lucid Dreaming and Creativity

Dreaming can get very complicated, especially lucid dreaming. In seventh grade, my friends and I started a club dedicated to learning Spanish, called the Hablaba Club. We joked around, talking about how we could improve membership if we created our own clothing merchandise. Later that night, when I fell asleep, I realized that I was conscious and could do anything I wanted. I decided to try our idea, where we would collaborate with famous clothing brands like Supreme. This is a depiction of what I created in my dream:

Please don’t judge, this was in the seventh grade. But my story leads to my main question: what is the function of lucid dreaming? Why does such a thing exist and why can we do it?

Our brain is still very unknown. Many scientists continue to discover the different functions of the most powerful muscle in our bodies. One of those functions is dreaming, a very complicated and mysterious function that humans experience every night. Humans dream every single night, and sometimes they may recall what they dreamt about. One type of dream is called lucid dreaming, where a dreamer is aware he or she is dreaming while sleeping. Not everyone can experience this phenomenon – about 55% of people did experience a lucid dream at least once in their lifetime. Additionally, only 0.3-0.8% of recalled dreams are actual lucid dreams. Basically, lucid dreaming is a very rare and confounding experience that the world continues to learn about.

How do humans lucid dream? Lucid dreams usually happen during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, a stage where the brain becomes extremely active while the body is paralyzed. The cerebral neurons during REM sleep are firing at the same intensity as in wakefulness. However, electrical connectivity in the brain is different during REM sleep compared to wakefulness. The frontal and posterior areas of the brain are less coherent, or less synchronized with each other, while the posterior left and right side are much more coherent. The other type of sleep, called non-REM sleep, is a stage where brain waves, heartbeat, and eye movement slow down. REM sleep causes the propensity of the person to dream more vividly, which explains why lucid dreams are usually caused by REM sleep. When one starts to fall asleep, they enter a light stage of non-REM sleep, followed by a deep stage of non-REM sleep, and then finally into REM sleep. A person would enter into longer periods of REM sleep later into the cycle. The pattern of a typical night sleep looks like this:

The one question scientists ask about dreaming is its function: how did it develop and why? Many theorize that mammals started to dream through REM sleep in order to evolve and learn how to survive. One popular hypothesis explains how dreams, specifically REM sleep, was used to help mammals evolve in order to survive. Younger children would dream much more than older children about other dangerous animals because dreams are naturally biased toward simulating ancestral threats. For example, younger children would dream about an encounter with a snake. Why do you think babies cry suddenly during the night? It could be their dreams about dangerous animals and their imaginary fight for survival.

This graph shows the percentage of dreams involving an animal dreamt by humans. Humans aged four dream about animals the most, while humans over eighteen barely dream about animals.

According to the data table, frequent lucid dreamers had a much higher creativity mean score than the non-lucid dreamers. This evidence could show that lucid dreaming has a function for creativity and problem-solving.

So, how does lucid dreaming connect to art? Well, many painters, musicians, writers, and scientists created their works through lucid dreaming. More dream inspirations occur in the visual arts, which is why many painters created their works from lucid dreaming. A painter named Edward Burne-Jones drew “The Rose Bower”, a drawing inspired by his lucid dream where he dreamt about twelve muses on Mount Helicon. Other artists that were inspired by their own lucid dreams were Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, and Gil Bruvel.

Lucid dreaming is a very interesting topic, and I would love to experience it again. The creativity in your own world runs wild, as you can see in my own example. Under the right conditions, you yourself can experience lucid dreaming. It may be hard and time-consuming, but it is very worthwhile to try it at least once. After all, it is a natural process in our own bodies, and you could gain some creative ideas from it. Happy dreaming!

Bibliography:

Barrett D. 2017. Dreams and creative problem-solving: Dreams and creative problem-solving. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1406(1):64–67.

Revonsuo A, editor. 2000. The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Zink N. 2013. Relationship between lucid dreaming, creativity, and dream characteristics. Uni-heidelberg.de. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/article/view/10640/pdf_50.

Lucid Dream Analysis Could Tap the Creative Unconscious

Becoming aware of your sleeping self could relieve anxiety or tap the creative unconscious

By Ursula Voss

©ISTOCK.COM

I moved my eyes, and I realized that I was asleep in bed. When I saw the beautiful landscape start to blur, I thought to myself, “This is my dream; I want it to stay!” And the scene reappeared. Then I thought to myself how nice it would be to gallop through this landscape. I got myself a horse ... I could feel myself riding the horse and lying in bed at the same time .

So recounted a test subject in the sleep laboratory at the University of Bonn in Germany. This particular sleeper was having a lucid dream, in which the dreamer recognizes that he or she is dreaming and can sometimes influence the course of the dream. By measuring the brain waves of lucid dreamers, my colleagues have gained a better understanding of the neural processes underlying this state of consciousness that exists between sleep and waking. In addition to providing clues about the nature of consciousness, research on lucid dreams is also beginning to suggest new ways to treat anxiety and learn complex movements while asleep.

Most people report having a lucid dream at least once in their life, and a small fraction of us have them as often as once or twice a week. Some individuals even develop routines to increase their chances of having a lucid dream [ see “Am I Dreaming?” below ]. But researchers who wanted to study lucid dreams were long confounded by the need to rely on subjects' self-reports. The process of recall is notoriously prone to distortion; for example, some people may confuse lucid dreams with the transient hallucinations that occur while falling asleep or waking up.

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In the mid-1970s some pioneers in the sleep research field figured out a way to prevent such misinterpretation. The researchers instructed subjects to move their eyes a certain way as soon as the sleepers recognized that they were dreaming, for example, by rolling their eyes twice from left to right. These signals can be easily distinguished from the rapid eye movement (REM) that occurs randomly during dreams. We still use this method today.

After a sleeper has signaled with eye movements that a lucid dream has started, researchers can investigate the corresponding brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). In an EEG recording, electrodes attached to the skin of the head pick up the oscillating electrical signals that indicate that thousands or millions of neurons are firing in synchrony. Recent studies indicate that the brain's activity during lucid dreaming resembles that of waking consciousness.

In 2009 my team and I decided to take a closer look at the brain activity of lucid dreamers. In the sleep lab, we found what we believe to be an electrical signature of lucid dreaming—increased activity in the 40-hertz range (the “gamma band”), primarily in the frontal lobe, located behind the forehead. We tend to generate these high-frequency waves when we concentrate on a particular object. In addition to the frontal lobe, other regions of the cerebral cortex—the rippled mantle on the surface of the brain—play a major role in lucid dreaming. The frontal lobe seems to work in lucid dreams much as it does in the waking state.

Another striking feature in our study involved coherence—a rough measure of how coordinated the activity is in various areas of the brain. Coherence is generally slightly decreased in REM sleep but not during lucid dreams. Think of the brain's activity during REM sleep as equivalent to a party with all the guests talking simultaneously. In lucid dreams, however, the party guests converse with one another, and the background noise decreases.

Beyond Fantasies

Until recently, most experts thought of lucid dreaming as a curiosity—a fun way to act out wishful thinking about flying or meeting celebrities—but research has uncovered practical uses. Chronic nightmare sufferers often find their only source of relief is learning how to take control of their dreams. A study in October 2006 in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics found that those who learned how to increase their frequency of lucid dreams reported fewer awful dreams, although the exact mechanism underlying the relief is unclear. Perhaps becoming aware during a bad dream allows sufferers to distance themselves emotionally from the content.

In theory, lucid dreams could help alleviate generalized anxiety or the reaction to specific stimuli (for instance, spiders) by allowing people to confront worries and frights in the safe environment afforded by knowing “it's just a dream.” Our work with patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder suggests that learning how to control dreams reduces the fear of dreaming, boosts self-confidence and makes patients more optimistic about their ability to eventually cope with their trauma.

Beyond therapeutic applications, lucid dreaming may also improve athletic performance. According to sports psychologist Daniel Erlacher of the University of Bern in Switzerland, athletes can internalize complex motor sequences, such as those needed in the high jump, more quickly after targeted lucid-dreaming training.

Some researchers have asked whether lucid dreams could be useful in focusing the dreamer's mind for problem-solving purposes. A small study in 2010 at Liverpool John Moores University in England suggested that lucid dreams are good for creative endeavors such as inventing metaphors but not for more rational exercises such as solving brainteasers. The lucid dreamers in the study were instructed to summon a “guru” figure, a wise character to serve as a kind of guide. Indeed, some of the subjects found their dream characters to be surprisingly helpful.

We still have much to learn about lucid dreaming. For example, we do not know under what circumstances these dreams appear most frequently or how to induce them more reliably. What we have learned is that lucid dreaming is frequent in children until around age 16, particularly in children with higher cognitive abilities. This leads us to believe that lucid dreaming occurs naturally in the course of frontal lobe integration and brain maturation. Of course, it also raises many new questions, such as whether lucid dreaming may prove useful in enhancing cognitive functioning. Lucid dreaming's potential for therapy, problem solving or pure entertainment could be limitless.

Am I Dreaming?

Lucid dreams cannot be willfully induced, but you can increase the likelihood that you will have one. People who practice these techniques regularly are able to have one or two lucid dreams a week.

1. Throughout each day, ask yourself repeatedly if you are awake. When this habit becomes ingrained, you may find yourself asking the question in a dream—at which point your chances of realizing you are dreaming skyrocket.

2. Make a point to look in a mirror or reread a bit of text every so often as a “reality check.” In dreams, our appearance is often altered and the written word is notoriously hard to pin down. You may carry the habit of checking for these dream signs into sleep, where they could alert you to the fact that you are dreaming.

3. Keep a dream journal by the bed and jot down the dreams you remember immediately on waking. Studies show that this practice makes you more aware of your dreams in general, and people who are more aware of their dreams are more likely to have a lucid dream.

4. Before falling asleep, focus intently on the fantasy you hope to experience in as much detail as possible. Research shows that “incubating” an idea just before bed dramatically increases the likelihood that you will dream about it. And if you suddenly notice that you are dancing with the movie star you hoped to meet, you might just realize you are having a dream and be able to take control of what happens next.

Adapted from the Lucidity Institute's Web site: www.lucidity.com

Ursula Voss lectures at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany and heads the clinical neuropsychology department at Vitos Hochtaunus Hospital.

Newsletters

I taught myself to lucid dream. You can too.

We still don’t know much about the experience of being aware that you’re dreaming—but a few researchers think it could help us find out more about how the brain works.

Neel V. Patel archive page

When I was 19—long before I ever thought I would land a career writing about space—I dreamed I was standing on the surface of Mars, looking over a rusted desert dotted with rocks, stuck in a perpetual lukewarm dusk, transfixed by the desolation. After soaking everything in for what seemed like hours, I looked up and saw a space station hanging in the sky. I decided to fly up there using some kind of Iron Man–like jet boots on my feet. Then I woke up.

I didn’t just happen to stumble on Mars in my dream. I knew I was asleep the whole time. Engaged in what’s called “lucid” dreaming , I chose to appear on Mars. I chose to bask in the extraterrestrial solitude; I chose to go flying. And since I was having lucid dreams almost every night at the time, I experienced multiple variations of this dream—each weirder and better than the one before.

Lucid dreaming isn’t easy to describe, and the way it works varies from one person to the next. But at its core, it means being conscious of the dream state—allowing you to play a more active role. Some of my own lucid dreams were like blank canvases where I’d imagine a wild new environment and make it up as I went along. Others allowed me to process stressful situations like public speaking (I got good at making this feel casual and relaxed just by practicing in a dream). In one memorable dream I played cards with my grandmother, who’d died years earlier. The experience helped me to understand my emotions toward her in a way I never could have managed as an ornery 13-year-old.

Even when it feels as though they’re completely random, dreams have power. Aside from giving us a break from the tedious physical and social limits of the real world, they can help us process grief and make us feel more creative. But when I was lucid—a state I achieve only rarely these days—I found that I got more out of sleep. People who post their experiences with lucid dreaming in online forums often write about how it inspired new works of music or fiction, helped them brainstorm solutions to real-world problems, or simply provided weird moments of memorable amusement.

“You can make the argument that REM sleep is kind of a neglected resource,” says Benjamin Baird , a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies human cognition. “What if we could use this state for when people can actually have control over their thoughts and actions and decide what they want to do? The state could potentially be used for entertainment and creative problem--solving, and learning about how memory works, and all kinds of different [neuroscience].”

Baird thinks one especially intriguing application for lucid dreaming might be in art. “One technique from the visual artists I’ve met is that they find an ‘art gallery’ in their lucid dream and look at the painting hanging in the gallery,” he says. “They then wake up and paint what they saw. The same can be done analogously for hearing musical scores. It’s as if someone else is creating it, but it’s your own mind.”

A small but growing number of scientists led by Baird and other sleep labs around the world hope to learn more about how lucid dreaming works, how it’s triggered, and whether the average person can be taught how to do it regularly. By studying individuals who are able to recall what happened to them in their dreams, these researchers can correlate what cognitive processes are occurring in the mind while brain and physiological activity is being measured and observed. For example, how does the brain perceive specific objects or physical tasks taking place solely in the mind? How does it respond to visuals that aren’t really there? How does it emulate parts of consciousness without actually being fully conscious?

Some researchers, like Martin Dresler , a cognitive neuroscientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, suggest lucid dreaming could even be used to combat clinical disorders like recurring nightmares or PTSD. “I think it’s quite intuitive and plausible that if during a nightmare you realize that it’s not real, that obviously takes much of the sort of sting out of the nightmare,” he says. You may be able to simply train yourself to wake up and end the dream, or overcome the very vivid feelings of fear and fright by telling yourself that it’s a dream.

In one memorable dream I played cards with my grandmother, who’d died years earlier. The experience helped me to understand my emotions toward her in a way I never could have managed as an ornery 13-year-old.

Why do we dream? Scientists still don’t really know. Freud thought dreams were our subconscious showing us our repressed wishes . Some evolutionary biologists believe dreaming evolved so we could play out threatening scenarios from real life and figure out how to react appropriately. Many neuroscientists who’ve studied neuronal firing during sleep believe dreams play a role in how we encode and consolidate memories. Harvard psychiatrist Allan Hobson thought dreaming was how the brain reconciled what different layers of consciousness had absorbed throughout the day.

But while dreaming itself is a robust topic of interest among researchers, lucid dreaming has historically been relegated to the fringes. Its first documented mention in Western civilization may have been in the fourth century BCE by Aristotle, in a treatise entitled “On Dreams,” where he noted that “often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.”

Scattered anecdotal evidence of lucid dreaming would come up infrequently in scientific literature over the next two millennia, but more as a curiosity than a real scientific inquiry. In 1913, Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden coined the term “lucid dream” in an article describing a state of dreaming where one experiences “having insight.” The phenomenon was first scientifically verified in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks mainly to Stanford University psychologist Stephen LaBerge . Scientists had known for years that sleepers’ eyes moved in the same direction as their gaze within a dream, and in a 1981 study, LaBerge gave lucid dreamers specific instructions about where to look during their dream—up and down 10 times in a row, or left to right six times, for example—and then observed their eye movements during sleep. The results showed that lucid dreamers were not just in control of their dreamscape but could execute decisions that had been outlined while they were awake. Eye movements are now the gold-standard technique researchers use to objectively verify a lucid dream state in the lab.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in recent years was a February 2021 study that proved lucid dreamers could conduct two-way communication with people who were awake. In a paper published in Current Biology, the researchers explained how, in four different labs around the world, they asked lucid dreamers questions (such as “What is 8 minus 6?”) by using spoken messages, beeping tones, flashing lights, or tactile stimulation. The participants would respond with specific eye movements. The researchers were, effectively, having a conversation with somebody who was asleep.

One analysis of 34 studies conducted over a half-century suggests that about 55% of all people report experiencing a lucid dream at least once in their life, and nearly a quarter have such dreams at least once a month. But there’s an extremely high degree of variability between these studies, and the vast majority of them look mainly at Westerners.

The painful truth is that lucid dreaming is poorly understood because so little research has been done—which is partly because consistent lucid dreamers are quite rare, and even more difficult to snag for a lab study. LaBerge, the closest thing to the godfather of the field, pinned down some of its common biological traits—that it occurs in the later stages of REM sleep when rapid eye movement peaks, for example. People also experienced higher respiration and heart rates during lucid dreaming than normal dreaming, suggesting that the dreamers were in a more active state. Dresler, the Dutch neuroscientist, spearheaded the only fMRI study of lucid dreaming to date in 2012, with a single subject. On the basis of those observations, he believes the phenomenon is tied to increased activation of the frontopolar cortex, which plays a role in metacognition—awareness of one’s own thought processes. He also worked on research in 2015 showing that people who are frequent lucid dreamers have more gray matter located in the frontal polar cortices.

HOW TO LUCID DREAM

Scientists and enthusiasts have successfully used some of these tricks to spark a lucid dream., 1. start remembering your dreams.

Before you can have a lucid dream, you need to be more conscious about your dreams generally. Keep a dream journal and fill it out as soon as you wake up. Write down in detail every- thing you remember.

2. Set a goal

Baird and others suggest that mindfulness—having increased awareness of the present moment—is key to lucid dreaming. Keeping your desire to have a lucid dream at the forefront of your mind as you drift off may help.

3. Test out reality

The movie Inception popularized the idea of a “totem” to check whether you’re dreaming. LaBerge and others have anecdotally found that this approach has some use. Do some reality checks when you’re awake, like seeing if the lights work when you flick them on or off, and this could then become a dream habit as well .

4. Meditate

My own lucid dreaming began when I started meditating for a few minutes every day, around age 15. Several studies have found correlations between meditation and lucid dreaming, although it’s still unclear what that connection might be.

5. Be open to experience

A common trait among lucid dreamers is an openness to experience. That means one of the best changes you can make has little to do with sleeping itself, but with your day-to-day life. Try new things; push yourself to be more curious about your environment. Then see if you can bring that openness to your dreaming.

Likewise, there’s no accepted prescription among scientists for how to trigger a lucid dream, but some interventions have shown more promise than others (see sidebar at right). Acetylcholine is the main neurotransmitter responsible for inducing REM sleep, and drugs that ramp it up—like galantamine, which is used to treat mild to moderate Alzheimer’s—have been highly successful in helping people have lucid dreams in lab studies. A trio of German and Swiss researchers are interested in using noninvasive brain stimulation techniques to induce lucid dreaming, though almost a decade on, they haven’t had much success. One informal study conducted by LaBerge suggests that trying to change light levels in a dream (say, flicking a light switch on and off) and observing a reflection in a mirror sometimes reveal that one is dreaming, since in the dream state these actions don’t work the way they do in real life.

Researchers like Baird and Dresler are constrained by the fact that most institutions don’t consider spending $500 an hour on fMRI machines to watch lucid dreamers a worthwhile investment. But they are encouraged by the fact that there’s a greater interest in dreaming studies at large. That’s especially true after reports in 2020 (including a study of dream content from around the world, published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology) suggested that pandemic lockdowns were doing weird stuff to our dreams. Some people are experiencing a heightened desire to find a bit more control over their lives, and that includes dreaming. I’d certainly count myself among them.

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