A growing contingent of researchers believes that our night dreams are subconscious incubators capable of creating answers to life’s enigmas — a notion sprung from sleep labs where researchers peek inside the brain at rest.
The data is clear: While asleep, the brain is capable of doing things it can’t do when it’s awake.
When Lisa Byerley Gary, 42, and her husband launched a weekly newspaper, she was in charge of layout and had to use an unfamiliar software program. Now a writing instructor at the University of Tennessee, Byerley Gary reflects on those harried weeks and chuckles at how she tossed and turned.
“Night after night, all night long, I would dream about laying out pages on the computer,” she says. “I literally went through the steps of placing the text and making it fit.” In retrospect, she says, the dreams sped her along the learning curve. “The dreams reassured me that I was working on the problem while I slept,” she says. “My mind made use of every moment.”
Sleep is the glue that binds new information into the brain. A cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School looks at the effect of sleep on learning and memory.
In one study, the researchers taught volunteers how to perform a task. Later, the researchers measured how quickly the subjects completed the task. They found that people tested later the same day didn’t improve. But when they were allowed to sleep for at least 6 hours between the training and testing, their scores shot up by 15 percent. What really surprised the researchers was that participants continued to increase their scores over the next 2 or 3 days without further practice or training.
In another study, the volunteers — including five amnesiacs — played a video game a couple of hours a day for 3 days. Then they were roused just after they’d fallen asleep to discover what was running through their minds. Sure enough, they were dreaming of the game — and that was true even for the amnesiacs, who had no memory of having played it.
“It’s clear that a night of sleep changes the form of memories so you can perform tasks faster and more accurately.”
At the University of Maryland, a pioneer in dream interpretation sees dreams as a key therapeutic tool. In one experiment, she recruited 60 people to take part in three different types of therapy. One group looked at their own dreams, another analyzed a troubling event from their lives, and a control group probed someone else’s dream as if it were their own. During five 1-hour therapy sessions, the volunteers dissected the possible meaning of the dream or event and how it might apply to their lives. Afterward, they rated their satisfaction with the therapeutic process.
Those who examined their lives through the reflection of their own dreams were significantly more satisfied with the outcome than the people who just analyzed the event — or tried to make sense of others’ dreams. The dreams provided the key to fundamental issues that standard therapy couldn’t unlock.
“People carry dreams around with them for years and years, but it’s only once they begin to work on the underlying issue that the dream breaks apart.” “The dreams you need to pay attention to are those that haunt you.”
Dreams help people to navigate through the emotions of life, he says. When you look at it, emotionally significant events are just another opportunity for learning.
Dreams are as treasure maps to the unconscious. You can teach yourself how to incubate a problem in your dreams by focusing on it as you drifts to sleep. Dreaming is such an intuitive thing. If you can just unearth the emotion that’s hiding below the surface, you can figure out what to do next.
Mining Your Dreams for Answers: to remember your dreams more vividly and make the most of your problem-solving potential:
Start on a weekend: Dreams are best remembered when you wake without an alarm; that way, you’ll likely wake from REM sleep, and your dream will be fresh in your mind.
Sharpen your recall: Before you nod off, tell yourself your dreams matter and you want to remember them. Stating your intention is the first step toward enhancing dream recall. If you think they’re unimportant, you’ll forget them the instant you wake up.
Sleep on an easy one: Begin with something simple, like how to fit an oversize sofa into your overstuffed living room. Slowly work your way up to more intricate problems, like how to resolve a childhood issue with your sister.
Stay on track: Make the question the last thing you think about before nodding off. As you drift to sleep, you’re very suggestible; it’s a bit like a hypnotic trance. Use this time to conjure up your problem. Sum it up in one or two short sentences. If possible, put an object representing the quandary on a bedside table. If not, call to mind a clear image of the issue — just make sure it’s the last thing you mull over.
Write it down: Keep a pad of paper and a pen next to your bed. Upon waking, take a moment to lie quietly. Glance around the outskirts of your consciousness to see if a dream is lurking. If a fragment comes into your head, gently follow it backward. We usually remember our dreams in reverse.
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