Dream engineering may boost problem-solving skills

The idea of planting thoughts inside dreams may sound like science fiction — think Inception — but new research suggests the concept could have real-world applications.

A team of researchers at Northwestern University has demonstrated that it’s possible to prompt sleeping volunteers to dream about specific unsolved puzzles using carefully timed sound cues. Even more striking: participants who dreamed about the puzzles were significantly more likely to solve them after waking up.

In the study, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, 20 volunteers — most of them experienced lucid dreamers — were first given challenging puzzles to complete. Each puzzle was paired with a distinct soundtrack. Later, while participants slept, researchers played audio cues linked to half of the unsolved puzzles in an effort to influence dream content.

Twelve participants showed signs that the prompts worked, signaling during sleep that they were dreaming about the cued puzzles. Among this group, problem-solving success doubled — rising from 20 percent to 40 percent the next day. Across all participants, puzzles that appeared in dreams had a 42 percent solving rate, compared with just 17 percent for puzzles that were not dreamed about.

Researchers caution that the study was small and largely focused on lucid dreamers, who may be more responsive to dream manipulation than the general population. Because the study was observational, it’s also difficult to prove definitively that dreaming itself caused the improvement in performance.

Still, the findings suggest dreams may play a more active role in creativity and problem-solving than previously thought — raising the possibility that “dream engineering” could one day become a tool for boosting innovation and mental performance.