Dr Karen Conkley

It was learning...

a flying virtual reality game.

So you are like virtually flying through these targets and it's a kind of a difficult motor task.

And she found that if people dreamed of the task and particularly if they dreamed of the kinesthetic elements of the task, their dream involved these bodily movements and the sense of balance that predicted their improvement the next day.

And so it seems like as opposed to rote or repetitive learning, dreams might be particularly suited for kind of weird types of motor tasks, like

REM sleep is associated with like acrobatic trampolining.

And so it might be these like really new things that your dreams and REM sleep are particularly good at helping you with during the night.

There are some studies that do that, that you could, for instance, manipulate the time of a nap.

So like a nap in the early morning is more likely to have more REM sleep than a nap in the afternoon.

But one thing to remember is that dreams actually happen in all stages of sleep.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yes.

Dreams.

And so like the function of REM sleep and the function of dreams are overlapping, but not quite the same.

And so what we've tried to do in our studies is say, all right, everybody's having, you know, roughly the same amount of, of REM sleep, the same sleep structure.

And can we within each person manipulate what they dream about?

So you're going to dream of these two puzzles and not these two puzzles.

And so that way you have stronger power because it's the same person who's

within their dreams, you're saying dream of some topics and not others.