Dr Karen Conkley

And so overall there was an effect, but it was really driven by those 12 people.

And so for those 12 people who tended to be the ones who were more successful having lucid dreams and hearing the instructions and things like that, they were more likely to solve the cued puzzles.

Whereas in the overall sample, the sounds themselves didn't

actually predict solving it was the dreams that predicted solving so there's kind of like three variables there that are all interacting but um yeah i think being a good lucid dreamer being able to hold that you know intention in mind of what you're going to dream about and of course we also had a lot of variability in the which puzzles participants happen to be stuck on it like it could be that some participants like no matter what their dreams did were always going to solve a particular puzzle because it wasn't that hard for them and other participants like might

have found some puzzles like insolvable.

And so even if they dreamed about it, they wouldn't solve it.

So there was definitely, you know, a lot of opportunities for noise in the measures, but nevertheless, we did find that these effects.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting.

In that study, we actually had people fill out a dream diary for a week and a half after the study.

And we found that people continued dreaming of the puzzles and they did several times solve them in their dreams at home.

Another puzzle is the question, G-E-S-G, what does that mean?

And one dreamer had this dream and she was like, my dream was very strong on breakfast.

Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle, G-E-S-G.

And the solution is scrambled eggs.

It's like the

the letters in the word eggs that are scrambled.

So it definitely affects people's dreams.

And I think that it's important to not over engineer dreams and to remember that, you know, a big reason why we did this study was to try to understand why we dream in the first place.

Is this state actually good for?