Dr Karen Conkley

You can't plant them in a straight line because the trees on the far ends are too far.

And you can't plant them in a square because the trees at the diagonal are farther apart because of the Pythagorean theorem.

So how do you plant them?

And so we gave participants all sorts of puzzles like this one.

And when they were awake, they were working on the puzzles until they kind of became stumped.

They reached an impasse where they just couldn't progress towards the solution any longer.

And as they listened to each puzzle, they were hearing a musical backing track unique to that puzzle.

Then the participants went to sleep and we woke them up at 4 a.m.

and did a training to help promote lucid dreams.

And these participants were already experienced lucid dreamers.

And then when the participants returned to sleep, we presented sounds from only two of the four unsolved puzzles in their dreams.

And we said, if you hear the puzzle sound in your dream, continue working on that puzzle.

So you could ask a dream character or the dream itself to work with you on the puzzle.

You could enter the puzzle scenario in the dream, try to find those trees.

And so kind of try to work with your subconscious mind to get more information about solving the puzzles.

And so what we found is that when we presented the cues, sleepers did dream of those puzzles that we were cuing.

And if they dreamed of a puzzle, they were more likely to solve it the next morning.

And so the answer to that trees puzzle, which one dreamer did a dream of in her dream, she was in a tattoo parlor and she saw the trees tattoo on someone's arm.

And she realized that you have to do it in 3D.

You have to plant the third tree on a hill so that they're in like a pyramid shape.