Ap Dijksterhuis

participants in experiments would read quite complex information about the relationship of certain stimuli like a is always bigger than b and b is always bigger than c and c is always bigger than d but in later experiments they made this information quite complex and

During the night, people could sleep.

Other people did this during the day.

So they also had eight hours until they came back to the testing room, but they couldn't sleep.

And it turns out that during REM sleep, this is where people make these interesting connections and people start to understand these very complex relations between stimuli.

So only the group that slept during the night in a normal way

could solve these complicated problems.

People who were woken up during their REM sleep couldn't, and people who studied this during the day and so didn't sleep, they couldn't solve these problems either.

Yes indeed, REM sleep is basically our dream sleep and it's long been known that it is indeed associated with creativity.

KQ Lay of course is a good example.

We know that yesterday, probably the most famous song by the Beatles, the melody of yesterday was dreamt by Paul McCartney.

He woke up in the morning

And he played that melody that he had dreamt.

But for weeks he thought, you know, it must have been plagiarism.

I must have heard it somewhere before.

And that's why it reappeared in my dream.

And then he and Lennon and the other fellow band members started to listen to other music, but they couldn't find it.

And only after a few weeks they realized, no, this is really something new.

And he dreamt up a melody.

Absolutely.