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Solving Problems in Your Dreams

 

Dream States. We now delve into the great known unknown, the mind’s secret weapon, the dream.  Therein lies a power most certainly unknown, and scarcely studied. Let’s begin at the movies.

What happens when you watch an intense movie late at night?  Your mind is absorbed in the pictures, dialogue, and sounds of the film.  Your mind still dwells on these, computing, digesting, and ruminating on all of these even into sleep. In your dreams, your subconscious mind recalls all these thoughts but convolutes them as only dreams can. Maybe you wake up with yourself a part of the distortion. Maybe, you make it through the night of restless sleep but you wake troubled. Dreams fade quickly, happily.  Has this happened to you?  To me, many times. As a pre-teen, my dad took me to the movie, The Man with the Atom Brain.  The imagery and plot of that movie stayed with me for years. I know this was a childhood fantasy, scientifically unrealizable even now, but a remake of the movie titled, The Man with the AI Brain, seems just as scary even for us adults. Even now, chips are being implanted in people and in the brain – for the good of course.

Welcome to one aspect of creative thinking, invention, and conceptual revelation.  How’s that? Let’s reshape the movie episode. Let’s consider you’ve been working on some issues/problems/situations intensely for days or weeks – right up to bedtime. Haven’t we all? It’s the same story. Your thoughts before bedtime weave their way into your dreams. You wake up the next morning.  This morning you resume your work, but something different happens.  There appears a new idea. It might work, you think! Where it came from is best described as “out of the blue.”

This is one the world of discovery! What is described does happen. It’s happened to many, me, and maybe you. This is the power of the incubation of thought and the dreaming mind. It is not by formula, and it’s not by logic. It reveals powers of mind unquantifiable and unqualifiable. It happens rarely, but it happens.  Alas, more often than not, your new idea is no better than any precedent. But how many ancient hunters woke up one morning with a new approach to their craft? Even the great Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), a Lyons weaver extraordinaire, perhaps woke one morning in 1852 with the concept of the punched card programming of looms. While this is conjecture, it is apparently true that Elias Howe Jr. (1819-1867), an American inventor, who is credited with developing the modern sewing machine, had a dream which led to his invention of the lockstitch sewing machine[1].  It revolutionized weaving, surviving to this day. (Looms are now programmed electronically, of course.) It seems also to be a fact that the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) in a dream. Throughout his life, he pursued this dreamscape method to design his stories[2].

Nonetheless, the mind is far more powerful, though decidedly unpredictable, than any assessment has yet shown. The marvel of insight, even through dreams, is essential, fundamental, and without valuation. Logic is but one solution tool, often transcended by the full powers of your mind. Dream-state solutions are so difficult to classify as a method, they cannot be put into our general categories.  Yet, it is a modern research subject[3],[4]. They are an essential part of the mind’s toolkit but are rather unreliable. Different from Albert Einstein’s thought experiments, they enjoy no controlled intellectual guidance.  But when nothing else is working…?

Remarkably, a recent MIT study showed that quick naps can enhance creativity[5]. Imagine that, a nap is a creativity pump. It is well known that naps reduce stress levels, increase energy levels, improve cognitive abilities, and enhance mood. Even fifteen minutes will do. Caution: naps can be habit-forming.


[1] Draper, Thomas Waln-Morgan (1900). The Bemis History and Genealogy: Being an Account, in Greater Part, of the Descendants of Joseph Bemis of Watertown, Massachusetts. San Francisco, Cal.

[2] Sawyers, June Skinner (ed.) (2002), Dreams of Elsewhere: The Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, The In Pin, Glasgow.

[3]  Barrett, Deirdre. The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—and How You Can Too. NY: Crown Books/Random House, 2001

[4] https://news.mit.edu/2020/targeted-dream-incubation-dormio-mit-media-lab-0721

[5] https://news.mit.edu/2023/sleep-sweet-spot-dreams-creativity-0515

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