By Veronique Greenwood 

Dreaming of solutions

Another theory is that lucid dreams might be too much like waking consciousness to help with solving problems. “Your unconscious mind has all this plurality of simultaneously thinking about 10 things at once…It's not limited by a single track,” Paller muses. “And maybe that's more creative, in a sense. Maybe lucidity is therefore antagonistic, because you want to not just focus on one thing, but focus on a whole bunch of things.”

The results tally with findings from other work on dreaming and creativity, says MIT’s Stickgold, who was not involved in the study. He points to a 2023 study from his group, led by Adam Horowitz, in which subjects were asked before sleeping to dream of trees. Upon waking, they were presented with tests of creativity around the theme of trees. While the study couldn’t control for what people were thinking about before they went to sleep, the way Paller and Konkoly’s study does, “the more references they had to trees in their dreams, the more creative they were,” Stickgold says. That suggests that priming people to dream about a subject can change how they think about it later.

The way forward

Regardless, Konkoly points out that the goal of this research is to understand what dreams might be doing for us. It’s not to enable us to manipulate dreams for our benefit, at least not yet.

“I think this idea of dream engineering, where you can work with dreams and interact with them, is really important for moving dream science forward,” she says. But “it's good to keep in mind...that without understanding exactly what dreams are for, we shouldn't try to co-opt all of them for our waking life goals.” 

Indeed, dreams have an odd staying power. Stickgold recalls that after the tree study, “Adam got notes and text messages from people a week later saying, ‘I'm still dreaming about trees.’” Stickgold wonders whether the effects might last longer than one might think.

“I would like to look at that–that dream induction leading to creativity–and really make clear whether this is a creativity that lasts for half an hour or a day or a week,” he says. “It might have a long-term effect.”