Overview
- Northwestern researchers paired each unsolved puzzle with a unique soundtrack, then replayed some of those sounds during monitored REM sleep to cue related dream content.
- Across participants, puzzles that showed up in dreams were solved at a higher rate the next day (about 42% versus 17% for puzzles not reported in dreams).
- In a subgroup of 12 whose dreams were specifically targeted, next-day performance on reactivated puzzles roughly doubled from about 20% to about 40%.
- Most volunteers were experienced lucid dreamers, and several signaled hearing the cues during REM via prearranged eye movements or sniffs, yet cues also influenced dreams without lucidity.
- Published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, the work is preliminary and correlational, and researchers call for larger, more diverse replications as experts also flag practical and ethical questions about dream engineering.