Dr Karen Conkley

And that's the way that you can plant the trees equidistant from one another.

Yeah, well, that was the original motivation for the study.

We had hoped that all the dreamers would solve them when they were asleep.

And the rationale was that dreams are a time when information could be really restructured, where you can kind of take weak associations and mix up, kind of flatten the curve of what you would normally think about so that—

Things that are more distant or like a new way of thinking about things, a new metaphor might become more readily apparent to you.

And so we thought that because REM sleep is associated with this restructuring and this abstract thinking, that it might help with insight.

And also, of course, because of all the anecdotes across history of people coming to these important insights in their dreams.

Yeah.

Mary Shelley thought of the plot of Frankenstein in a dream and the structure of the periodic table of elements came from a dream.

And so we kind of wanted to test that empirically.

And actually in the lab, most people didn't solve the puzzles in their dreams.

They would have a dream that just loosely related to the puzzle.

And yet the next day when they worked on it, if they had dreamt of it, they solved it more quickly.

20 people.

Each one did the experiment for two nights.

Totally.

Yeah.

So in the study, we actually had two groups.

There was a group of 12 dreamers that really dreamt the most of the cued puzzles.

And when we presented the cues, their dreams responded and incorporated the cued puzzles.