In the dream, her hands itched and burned; she looked down and saw they were covered by small black spots. The discomfort grew until the specks burst into a vibrant bouquet of flowers. Fryer took it to mean that she was holding her creativity in her hands, and only when she followed her passion would she flourish. A week later, she quit her job to pursue documentary filmmaking–a career she’d always longed to take up. “From the dream it was clear that I needed to take my creativity to the next level,” she says. “I knew it was going to be a painful transition, but I needed to do it.” Today, the 41-year-old is a successful filmmaker in Boulder, CO, and her life overflows with the artistic freedom she once craved. Even now, she takes solace in that liberating dream. “Whenever I doubt myself,” she says, “I return to this vision of my burgeoning creativity.” In scientific circles, dreams have long been pooh-poohed as nothing more than stumbles of the mind as it goes about its nightly maintenance routine. But investigators now say the evening escapades may be more than just brain blather. A growing contingent of researchers believes that our nocturnal musings are subconscious incubators capable of hatching answers to life’s enigmas–a notion sprung from sleep labs where researchers peek inside the brain at rest. The data is clear, says David Kahn, PhD, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School: While asleep, the brain is capable of doing things it can’t do when it’s awake. “Theoretically,” he says, “you can come up with a great idea because you’re thinking outside the box.” Could the answers to your daily dilemmas be in your dreams? Whether your quandary is how to finish the children’s book you started or find the route toward peace with a nosy neighbor, it’s time to wake up and take note. Those nightly images created by your gray matter may be telling you something.
Turn on your dream machine
Each night can be like watching a feature-length film of your own creation. In these flicks, you’re not only the action hero but also the writer and director. Costars come and go. Sometimes they’re your friends and family; other times you may share the marquee with a talking camel that fits conveniently inside your purse and sounds suspiciously like your mother-in-law. For most people, the show lasts upward of 2 hours a night. That’s how much time the average woman spends in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is the stage upon which our most elaborate dreams are cast. Although scientists now believe that people dream in both REM and non-REM sleep, the yarns woven from the colorful threads of REM sleep are the most creative, bizarre, and unusual of all. The brain makes its first foray into REM sleep 70 to 90 minutes after you doze off. On cue, the body responds as if you’d just guzzled a double latte. Breathing becomes faster, eyes jump back and forth, and heart rate increases. Luckily for your bedmate, your muscles are temporarily frozen, which keep you from pantomiming your escapades. You say you don’t remember your dreams? That doesn’t mean your dream dance card isn’t filled every night. Aside from a few rare exceptions, everyone dreams. Whether you take the Fifth probably has more to do with conditioning than memory. In dream studies, researchers note that women report dreaming more often than men and have greater dream recall. But it’s not that women dream more, says Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. They’re just more likely to remember their nighttime meanderings. She believes that women are generally more oriented toward their inner lives than men. Plus, a woman’s role as caregiver lends itself to dream recall. “Women sleep with one ear open, listening for the baby’s cry, the teenager coming home late, or an elderly relative needing care,” she explains, “so their sleep is more easily disturbed.” Frequent awakenings during the night raise the odds you’ll come to in the middle of a dream and realize you were just ballroom dancing with your golden labrador. Of course, not all dreams are so fanciful.[pagebreak]
Shape your solutions
A dream delivered an epiphany to Ann Eide, 37, a novelist in Columbus, MS. While working on her first novel in 2004, she was stumped by writer’s block for 6 long months. “Over and over again, I’d pick it up and put it down,” she says of her manuscript. “I just couldn’t get into it; I was stuck.” Then, last May, she dreamed she was standing in the middle of the scene she was struggling to write. She watched as her characters acted out the story line. She looked out the windows at the surroundings she’d created. She even went for a stroll through the landscape. When she felt satisfied, she woke up, went to her desk, and began to write. She finished the novel a month later. Reflecting on why the dream proved so significant, she says, “It allowed me to step into my characters’ lives, see things from their perspective, and feel the emotions they were feeling.” No problem is beyond the reach of a good dream, says Deirdre Barrett, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and editor of the journal Dreaming. Barrett describes dreams as “capable of breaking down preconceptions that block our abilities to solve problems in our waking lives.” Over the course of Barrett’s 28 years as a dream researcher, she’s found that people who are extremely creative or visual tend to plumb their dreamscapes for ideas. “Artists, architects, and inventors are much more likely to have dreams that present an answer to a spatial problem than scientists who work in more concrete realms.” But she’s quick to add that anyone can look to dreams when life presents a riddle. “Our brains are built to solve problems, no matter what state we are in.” Chances are you’ve told someone you’d “sleep on it” when faced with a sticky problem. Stories of people who’ve solved predicaments in their dreams dot history. But explanations of how dreams intervene when life throws a curveball have been tougher to come by. Now new brain imaging techniques have turned dream theory on its head. Just 10 years ago, scientists thought dreams sprouted from the brain stem, the organ’s most primitive region. But positron-emission tomography (PET) scans indicate that dreams start in the brain’s higher-functioning regions that regulate emotional behavior, specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The discovery that dreams come from a more highly evolved part of the brain was pivotal for those studying the nighttime story lines. Eric Nofzinger, PhD, is director of the sleep neuroimaging program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. With the help of brain imaging, he found that when people entered REM sleep, the ACC became very active. Previous brain imaging studies had shown that when people are awake and working on a task, it’s the ACC (the brain’s self-correcting mechanism) that notifies them of an error if they slip up and nudges them to make a correction. Nofzinger suspects that the activation of the ACC during REM sleep is the brain’s way of searching for answers that elude us in the light of day. Dream research has even revealed how long it takes the brain to sort out those answers. Studies from Don Kuiken, PhD, and Tore Nielsen, PhD, two of Canada’s premier dream researchers, suggest that a solution to a problem can take a week or more to surface. The theory is called the dream-lag effect. In their latest study, published in December 2004, Kuiken and Nielsen asked 470 college students to look for a dream related to recent events in their lives. The researchers found that the dreams helped solve the students’ problems, though it took 6 or 7 days to get an answer. When life presents a puzzle, says Kuiken, it often makes an immediate late-night appearance, only to fade from view and reemerge, along with a solution, roughly 1 week later. He sees the “dream lag” as evidence that the mind is in problem-solving mode even when you’ve put the issue on the back burner: “Dreams reformulate problems in ways we can’t imagine when we are awake. Dreaming has a rudimentary poetic quality that places our concerns in a new setting. This can present alternative ways of thinking about personal problems."[pagebreak]
Learn new skills by osmosis
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. Robert Stickgold, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, looks at the effect of sleep on learning and memory. In one study, Stickgold and his colleagues 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%. What really surprised Stickgold: Participants continued to increase their scores over the next 2 or 3 days without further practice or training. In another study, Stickgold had volunteers–including five amnesiacs–play a video game a couple of hours a day for 3 days. Then he roused them 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,” Stickgold says.
Chat with the night therapist
Lisa Richmon, a 46-year-old advertising executive in Virginia Beach, VA, had a tumultuous relationship with her mother. Then Richmon’s mother died rather suddenly from lung cancer at age 65. She reacted by dismissing memories of their mother-daughter disputes, focusing instead on her mother’s best attributes. But she quickly began having recurring dreams in which her mother abandoned or betrayed her. Mornings found her with a heavy heart, like a weight that needed lifting. “By day, I missed my mother and extolled her virtues whenever possible, but at night, I cast her in my dreams as unloving,” Richmon remembers. The dreams continued for 13 years, until she sought help from a therapist in 2004. In just two sessions, Richmon embraced the truth about her mother–that she wasn’t bad, but she wasn’t perfect either–and the dreams disappeared. The excessive emotions surrounding her mother also faded. “The experience helped me really look at some painful things that I needed to examine,” Richmon says. At the University of Maryland, Clara Hill, PhD, a pioneer in dream interpretation, sees dreams as a key therapeutic tool. In one experiment, she and her colleagues 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. Hill found that 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. Hill believes that the dreams provided the key to fundamental issues that standard therapy couldn’t unlock. She isn’t surprised by Richmon’s revelation. “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,” she says. “The dreams you need to pay attention to are those that haunt you.” For his part, Kuiken is still spelunking dreams in hopes of understanding more about the dream-lag effect and how the sleeping mind teases apart life’s tangles. 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.” Fryer continues to view her dreams as treasure maps to her unconscious and has been tracking them in a journal for 30 years. She has taught herself how to incubate a problem in her dreams by focusing on it as she drifts to sleep. “Dreaming is such an intuitive thing for me,” she says. “If I can just unearth the emotion that’s hiding below the surface, I can figure out what to do next."[pagebreak]
6 ways to mine your dreams for answers
Try these tips to remember your dreams more vividly and make the most of their problem-solving potential Start on a weekendDreams 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, says psychologist and dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center. 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, says G. William Domhoff, PhD, a dream researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “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. When Deirdre Barrett, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, asked college students to solve problems in their sleep, nearly half of the volunteers who chose a moderately easy problem dreamed a solution within a week. But their success rate ebbed as the problems became more complicated. 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,” says Barrett. 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,” says Domhoff. “We usually remember our dreams in reverse.” So, like a loose piece of yarn, a dream may unravel if you tug gently on one end. Keep still If you wake up in the middle of a dream, mimic the body in REM sleep by staying still. (During REM sleep, muscles are paralyzed, a protective mechanism that keeps you from socking your partner when you reach out to grab a flyaway Frisbee.) Use this time to think about the dream and trace its story line. Give the dream a title before you open your eyes, says Cartwright, because when the mind is awake, it’s more likely to remember a short catchphrase than the visual images. Then write down as much as you can remember.[pagebreak]
Famous dreamers
In her book, The Committee of Sleep, dream researcher Deirdre Barrett, PhD, recounts stories of celebrities and historical figures who’ve successfully mined their dreams for gold. Billy JoelThe singer/songwriter says he often dreams musical arrangements; he’s gone so far as to say, “I know all the music I’ve composed has come from a dream.” Annamaria GundlachThis artist found over time that she could design pots by waiting to see the next one in a dream. She observed its shape and size; it would usually be embedded with everyday objects such as nails and fabric, and she would faithfully re-create it. Her major traveling show was called Dreams in Clay. Paul Horowitz A real-life version of Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact,he’s a Harvard physics professor whose passion is designing telescopes to hunt for evidence of extraterrestrials. When he’s building a new one and gets stuck on a technical glitch, he’ll dream he’s looking over the shoulder of a man solving the very problem that has stumped him. Frederick BantingThis Canadian doctor dreamed a way to isolate insulin and, therefore, make diabetes treatable. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley On a rainy night in 1816, Lord Byron challenged his houseguests to write a horror story. That night, Shelley dreamed the basis for what would become her famed novel Frankenstein. Paul McCartneyIn 1965, the 22-year-old Beatle dreamed the melody of the song “Yesterday.” Upon waking, he immediately sat down and played it on the piano. Stephen King The prolific writer of grisly tales admits that he’s reaped images from his vivid dreamscapes for his novels and short stories, including Salem’s Lot and It. Katherine Mansfield An unusual dream experience became her successful short story Sun and Moon. It is an impressionistic tale seen through the eyes of a 5-year-old boy. “I dreamed it all,” she said.
