فصل 11

CHAPTER 11

Dream Creativity and Dream Control

Aside from being a stoic sentinel that guards your sanity and emotional well-being, REM sleep and the act of dreaming have another distinct benefit: intelligent information processing that inspires creativity and promotes problem solving. So much so, that some individuals try controlling this normally non-volitional process and direct their own dream experiences while dreaming.

DREAMING: THE CREATIVE INCUBATOR

Deep NREM sleep strengthens individual memories, as we now know. But it is REM sleep that offers the masterful and complementary benefit of fusing and blending those elemental ingredients together, in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge,I and then extract overarching rules and commonalities—“the gist.” We awake with a revised “Mind Wide Web” that is capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. In this way, REM-sleep dreaming is informational alchemy.

From this dreaming process, which I would describe as ideasthesia, have come some of the most revolutionary leaps forward in human progress. There is perhaps no better illustration highlighting the smarts of REM-sleep dreaming than the elegant solution to everything we know of, and how it fits together. I am not trying to be obtuse. Rather, I am describing the dream of Dmitri Mendeleev on February 17, 1869, which led to the periodic table of elements: the sublime ordering of all known constituent building blocks of nature.

Mendeleev, a Russian chemist of renowned ingenuity, had an obsession. He felt there might be an organizational logic to the known elements in the universe, euphemistically described by some as the search for God’s abacus. As proof of his obsession, Mendeleev made his own set of playing cards, with each card representing one of the universal elements and its unique chemical and physical properties. He would sit in his office, at home, or on long train rides, and maniacally deal the shuffled deck down onto a table, one card at a time, trying to deduce the rule of all rules that would explain how this ecumenical jigsaw puzzle fit together. For years he pondered the riddle of nature. For years he failed.

After allegedly having not slept for three days and three nights, he’d reached a crescendo of frustration with the challenge. While the extent of sleep deprivation seems unlikely, a clear truth was Mendeleev’s continued failure to crack the code. Succumbing to exhaustion, and with the elements still swirling in his mind and refusing organized logic, Mendeleev lay down to sleep. As he slept, he dreamed, and his dreaming brain accomplished what his waking brain was incapable of. The dream took hold of the swirling ingredients in his mind and, in a moment of creative brilliance, snapped them together in a divine grid, with each row (period) and each column (group) having a logical progression of atomic and orbiting electron characteristics, respectively. In Mendeleev’s own words:II

I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.

While some contest how complete the dream solution was, no one challenged the evidence that Mendeleev was provided a dream-inspired formulation of the periodic table. It was his dreaming brain, not his waking brain, that was able to perceive an organized arrangement of all known chemical elements. Leave it to REM-sleep dreaming to solve the baffling puzzle of how all constituents of the known universe fit together—an inspired revelation of cosmic magnitude.

My own field of neuroscience has been the beneficiary of similar dream-fueled revelations. The most impactful is that of neuroscientist Otto Loewi. Loewi dreamed of a clever experiment on two frogs’ hearts that would ultimately reveal how nerve cells communicate with each other using chemicals (neurotransmitters) released across tiny gaps that separate them (synapses), rather than direct electrical signaling that could only happen if they were physically touching each other. So profound was this dream-implanted discovery that it won Loewi a Nobel Prize.

We also know of precious artistic gifts that have arisen from dreams. Consider Paul McCartney’s origination of the songs “Yesterday” and “Let It Be.” Both came to McCartney in his sleep. In the case of “Yesterday,” McCartney recounts the following dream-inspired awakening while he was staying in a small attic room of his family’s house on Wimpole Street, London, during the filming of the delightful movie Help:

I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, “That’s great, I wonder what that is?” There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th—and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, “No, I’ve never written anything like this before.” But I had, which was the most magic thing!

Having been born and raised in Liverpool, I am admittedly biased toward emphasizing the dreaming brilliance of the Beatles. Not to be outdone, however, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has arguably the best sleep-inspired story, which gave rise to the opening riff of their song “Satisfaction.” Richards would routinely keep a guitar and tape recorder at his bedside to record ideas that would come to him in the night. He describes the following experience on May 7, 1965, after having returned to his hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, following a performance that evening:

I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, and I see that the tape is run to the very end. And I think, “Well, I didn’t do anything. Maybe I hit a button when I was asleep.” So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [the opening lines to “Satisfaction”]. It was a whole verse of it. And after that, there’s 40 minutes of me snoring. But there’s the song in its embryo, and I actually dreamt the damned thing.

The creative muse of dreaming has also sparked countless literary ideas and epics. Take the author Mary Shelley, who passed through a most frightening dream scene one summer night in 1816 while staying in one of Lord Byron’s estates near Lake Geneva—a dream she almost took to be waking reality. That dreamscape gave Shelley the vision and narrative for the spectacular gothic novel Frankenstein. Then there is the French surrealist poet St. Paul Boux, who well understood the fertile talents of dreaming. Before retiring each night, he is said to have hung a sign on his bedroom door that read: “Do Not Disturb: Poet at Work.”III

Anecdotes such as these are enjoyable stories to tell, but they do not serve as experimental data. What, then, is the scientific evidence establishing that sleep, and specifically REM sleep and dreaming, provides a form of associative memory processing—one that fosters problem solving? And what is so special about the neurophysiology of REM sleep that would explain these creative benefits, and the dreaming obligate to them?

REM-SLEEP FUZZY LOGIC

An obvious challenge to testing the brain when it is asleep is that . . . it is asleep. Sleeping individuals cannot engage in computerized tests nor provide useful responses—the typical way that cognitive scientists assess the workings of the brain. Short of lucid dreaming, which we will address at the end of this chapter, sleep scientists have been left wanting in this regard. We have frequently been resigned to passively observing brain activity during sleep, without ever being able to have participants perform tests while they are sleeping. Rather, we measure waking performance before and after sleep and determine if the sleep stages or dreaming that occurred in between explains any observed benefit the next day.

I and my colleague at Harvard Medical School Robert Stickgold designed a solution to this problem, albeit an indirect and imperfect one. In chapter 7 I described the phenomenon of sleep inertia—the carryover of the prior sleeping brain state into wakefulness in the minutes after waking up. We wondered whether we could turn this brief window of sleep inertia to our experimental advantage—not by waking subjects up in the morning and testing them, but rather by waking individuals up from different stages of NREM sleep and REM sleep throughout the night.

The dramatic alterations in brain activity during NREM and REM sleep, and their tidal shifts in neurochemical concentrations, do not reverse instantaneously when you awaken. Instead, the neural and chemical properties of that particular sleep stage will linger, creating the inertia period that separates true wakefulness from sleep, and last some minutes. Upon enforced awakening, the brain’s neurophysiology starts out far more sleep-like than wake-like and, with each passing minute, the concentration of the prior sleep stage from which an individual has been woken will gradually fade from the brain as true wakefulness rises to the surface.

By restricting the length of whatever cognitive test we performed to just ninety seconds, we felt we could wake individuals up and very quickly test them in this transitional sleep phase. In doing so, we could perhaps capture some of the functional properties of the sleep stage from which the participant was woken, like capturing the vapors of an evaporating substance and analyzing those vapors to draw conclusions about the properties of the substance itself.

It worked. We developed an anagram task in which the letters of real words were scrambled. Each word was composed of five letters, and the anagram puzzles only had one correct solution (e.g., “OSEOG” = “GOOSE”). Participants would see the scrambled words one at a time on the screen for just a few seconds, and they were asked to speak the solution, if they had one, before the time ran out and the next anagram word puzzle appeared on the screen. Each test session lasted only ninety seconds, and we recorded how many problems the participants correctly solved within this brief inertia period. We would then let the participants fall back asleep.

The subjects had the task described to them before going to bed in the sleep laboratory with electrodes placed on the head and face so that I could measure their sleep unfolding in real time on a monitor next door. The participants also performed a number of trials before getting into bed, allowing them to get familiar with the task and how it worked. After falling asleep, I then woke subjects up four times throughout the night, twice from NREM sleep early and late in the night, and twice from REM sleep, also early and late in the night.

Upon awakenings from NREM sleep, participants did not appear to be especially creative, solving few of the anagram puzzles. But it was a different story when I woke them up out of REM sleep, from the dreaming phase. Overall, problem-solving abilities rocketed up, with participants solving 15 to 35 percent more puzzles when emerging from REM sleep compared with awakenings from NREM sleep or during daytime waking performance!

Moreover, the way in which the participants were solving the problems after exiting REM sleep was different from how they solved the problems both when emerging from NREM sleep and while awake during the day. The solutions simply “popped out” following awakenings from REM sleep, one subject told me, though at the time, they did not know they had been in REM sleep just prior. Solutions seemed more effortless when the brain was being bathed by the afterglow of dream sleep. Based on response times, solutions arrived more instantaneously following an REM sleep awakening, relative to the slower, deliberative solutions that came when that same individual was exiting NREM sleep or when they were awake during the day. The lingering vapors of REM sleep were providing a more fluid, divergent, “open-minded” state of information processing.

Using the same type of experimental awakening method, Stickgold performed another clever test that reaffirmed how radically different the REM-sleep dreaming brain operates when it comes to creative memory processing. He examined the way in which our stores of related concepts, also known as semantic knowledge, function at night. It’s this semantic knowledge like a pyramidal family tree of relatedness that fans out from top to bottom in order of relatedness strength. Figure 14 is an example of one such associative web plucked from my own mind regarding UC Berkeley, where I am a professor:

Figure 14: Example of a Memory Association Network

Using a standard computer test, Stickgold measured how these associative networks of information operated following NREM-sleep and REM-sleep awakenings, and during standard performance during the waking day. When you wake the brain from NREM or measure performance during the day, the operating principles of the brain are closely and logically connected, just as pictured in figure 14. However, wake the brain up from REM sleep and the operating algorithm was completely different. Gone is the hierarchy of logical associative connection. The REM-sleep dreaming brain was utterly uninterested in bland, commonsense links—the one-step-to-the-next associations. Instead, the REM-sleep brain was shortcutting the obvious links and favoring very distantly related concepts. The logic guards had left the REM-sleep dreaming brain. Wonderfully eclectic lunatics were now running the associative memory asylum. From the REM-sleep dreaming state, almost anything goes—and the more bizarre the better, the results suggested.

The two experiments of anagram solving and semantic priming revealed how radically different the operating principles of the dreaming brain were, relative to those of NREM sleep and wakefulness. As we enter REM sleep and dreaming takes hold, an inspired form of memory mixology begins to occur. No longer are we constrained to see the most typical and plainly obvious connections between memory units. On the contrary, the brain becomes actively biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious links between sets of information.

This widening of our memory aperture is akin to peering through a telescope from the opposing end. When we are awake we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.

MEMORY MELDING IN THE FURNACE OF DREAMS

Overlay these two experimental findings onto the dream-inspired-problem-solving claims, such as those of Dmitri Mendeleev, and two clear, scientifically testable hypotheses emerge.

First, if we feed a waking brain with the individual ingredients of a problem, novel connections and problem solutions should preferentially—if not exclusively—emerge after time spent in the REM dreaming state, relative to an equivalent amount of deliberative time spent awake. Second, the content of people’s dreams, above and beyond simply having REM sleep, should determine the success of those hyper-associative problem-solving benefits. As with the effects of REM sleep on our emotional and mental well-being explored in the previous chapter, the latter would prove that REM sleep is necessary but not sufficient. It is both the act of dreaming and the associated content of those dreams that determine creative success.

That is precisely what we and others have found time and again. As an example, let’s say that I teach you a simple relationship between two objects, A and B, such that A should be chosen over object B (A>B). Then I teach you another relationship, which is that object B should be chosen over object C (B>C). Two separate, isolated premises. If I then show you A and C together, and ask you which you would choose, you would very likely pick A over C because your brain made an inferential leap. You took two preexisting memories (A>B and B>C) and, by flexibly interrelating them (A>B>C), came up with a completely novel answer to a previously unasked question (A>C). This is the power of relational memory processing, and it is one that receives an accelerated boost from REM sleep.

In a study conducted with my Harvard colleague Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, we taught participants lots of these individual premises that were nested in a large chain of interconnectedness. Then we gave them tests that assessed not just their knowledge of these individual pairs, but also assessed whether they knew how these items connected together in the associative chain. Only those who had slept and obtained late-morning REM sleep, rich in dreaming, showed evidence of linking the memory elements together (A>B>C>D>E>F, etc.), making them capable of the most distant associative leaps (e.g., B>E). The very same benefit was found after daytime naps of sixty to ninety minutes that also included REM sleep.

It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day. Our participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle complete. It is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Or, said more simply, learning versus comprehension. REM sleep allows your brain to move beyond the former and truly grasp the latter.

Some may consider this informational daisy-chaining to be trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. Computers can store thousands of individual files with precision. But standard computers do not intelligently interlink those files in numerous and creative combinations. Instead, computer files sit like isolated islands. Our human memories are, on the other hand, richly interconnected in webs of associations that lead to flexible, predictive powers. We have REM sleep, and the act of dreaming, to thank for much of that inventive hard work.

CODE CRACKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

More than simply melding information together in creative ways, REM-sleep dreaming can take things a step further. REM sleep is capable of creating abstract overarching knowledge and super-ordinate concepts out of sets of information. Think of an experienced physician who is able to seemingly intuit a diagnosis from the many tens of varied, subtle symptoms she observes in a patient. While this kind of abstractive skill can come after years of hard-earned experience, it is also the very same accurate gist extraction that we have observed REM sleep accomplishing within just one night.

A delightful example is observed in infants abstracting complex grammatical rules in a language they must learn. Even eighteen-month-old babies have been shown to deduce high-level grammatical structure from novel languages they hear, but only after they have slept following the initial exposure. As you will recall, REM sleep is especially dominant during this early-life window, and it is that REM sleep that plays a critical role in the development of language, we believe. But that benefit extends beyond infancy—very similar results have been reported in adults who are required to learn new language and grammar structures.

Perhaps the most striking proof of sleep-inspired insight, and one I most frequently describe when giving talks to start-up, tech, or innovative business companies to help them prioritize employee sleep, comes from a study conducted by Dr. Ullrich Wagner at the University of Lübeck, Germany. Trust me when I say you’d really rather not be a participant in these experiments. Not because you have to suffer extreme sleep deprivation for days, but because you have to work through hundreds of miserably laborious number-string problems, almost like having to do long division for an hour or more. Actually “laborious” is far too generous a description. It’s possible some people have lost the will to live while trying to sit and solve hundreds of these number problems! I know, I’ve taken the test myself.

You will be told that you can work through these problems using specific rules that are provided at the start of the experiment. Sneakily, what the researchers do not tell you about is the existence of a hidden rule, or shortcut, common across all the problems. If you figure out this embedded cheat, you can solve many more problems in a far shorter time. I’ll return to this shortcut in just a minute. After having had participants perform hundreds of these problems, they were to return twelve hours later and once again work through hundreds more of these mind-numbing problems. However, at the end of this second test session, the researchers asked whether the subjects had cottoned on to the hidden rule. Some of the participants spent that twelve-hour time delay awake across the day, while for others, that time window included a full eight-hour night of sleep.

After time spent awake across the day, despite the chance to consciously deliberate on the problem as much as they desired, a rather paltry 20 percent of participants were able to extract the embedded shortcut. Things were very different for those participants who had obtained a full night of sleep—one dressed with late-morning, REM-rich slumber. Almost 60 percent returned and had the “ah-ha!” moment of spotting the hidden cheat—which is a threefold difference in creative solution insight afforded by sleep!

Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from the French dormir sur un problem, to the Swahili kulala juu ya tatizo), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.

FUNCTION FOLLOWS FORM—DREAM CONTENT MATTERS

The author John Steinbeck wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” Should he have prefaced “committee” with the word “dream”? It appears so. The content of one’s dreams, more than simply dreaming per se, or even sleeping, determines problem-solving success. Though such a claim has long been made, it took the advent of virtual reality for us to prove as much—and in the process, shore up the claims of Mendeleev, Loewi, and many other nocturnal troubleshooters.

Enter my collaborator Robert Stickgold, who designed a clever experiment in which participants explored a computerized virtual reality maze. During an initial learning session, he would start participants off from different random locations within the virtual maze and ask them to navigate their way out through exploratory trial and error. To aid their learning, Stickgold placed unique objects, such as a Christmas tree, to act as orientation or anchor points at specific locations within the virtual maze.

Almost a hundred research participants explored the maze during the first learning session. Thereafter, half of them took a ninety-minute nap, while the other half remained awake and watched a video, all monitored with electrodes placed on the head and face. Throughout the ninety-minute epoch, Stickgold would occasionally wake the napping individuals and ask them about the content of any dreams they were having, or for the group that remained awake, ask them to report any particular thoughts that were going through their minds at the time. Following the ninety-minute period, and after another hour or so to overcome sleep inertia in those who napped, everyone was dropped back into the virtual maze and tested once more to see if their performance was any better than during initial learning.

It should come as no surprise by now that those participants who took a nap showed superior memory performance on the maze task. They could locate the navigation clues with ease, finding their way around and out of the maze faster than those who had not slept. The novel result, however, was the difference that dreaming made. Participants who slept and reported dreaming of elements of the maze, and themes around experiences clearly related to it, showed almost ten times more improvement in their task performance upon awakening than those who slept just as much, and also dreamed, but did not dream of maze-related experiences.

As in his earlier studies, Stickgold found that the dreams of these super-navigators were not a precise replay of the initial learning experience while awake. For example, one participant’s dream report stated: “I was thinking about the maze and kinda having people as checkpoints, I guess, and then that led me to think about when I went on this trip a few years ago and we went to see these bat caves, and they’re kind of like, maze-like.” There were no bats in Stickgold’s virtual maze, nor were there any other people or checkpoints. Clearly, the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge.

Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming takes the approach of interrogating our recent autobiographical experience and skillfully positioning it within the context of past experiences and accomplishments, building a rich tapestry of meaning. “How can I understand and connect that which I have recently learned with that I already know, and in doing so, discover insightful new links and revelations?” Moreover, “What have I done in the past that might be useful in potentially solving this newly experienced problem in the future?” Different from solidifying memories, which we now realize to be the job of NREM sleep, REM sleep, and the act of dreaming, takes that which we have learned in one experience setting and seeks to apply it to others stored in memory.

When I have discussed these scientific discoveries in public lectures, some individuals will question their validity on the grounds of historical legends who were acclaimed short-sleepers, yet still demonstrated remarkable creative prowess. One common name that I frequently encounter in such rebuttals is the inventor Thomas Edison. We will never truly know if Edison was the short-sleeper that some, including himself, claim. What we do know, however, is that Edison was a habitual daytime napper. He understood the creative brilliance of dreaming, and used it ruthlessly as a tool, describing it as “the genius gap.”

Edison would allegedly position a chair with armrests at the side of his study desk, on top of which he would place a pad of paper and a pen. Then he would take a metal saucepan and turn it upside down, carefully positioning it on the floor directly below the right-side armrest of the chair. If that were not strange enough, he would pick up two or three steel ball bearings in his right hand. Finally, Edison would settle himself down into the chair, right hand supported by the armrest, grasping the ball bearings. Only then would Edison ease back and allow sleep to consume him whole. At the moment he began to dream, his muscle tone would relax and he would release the ball bearings, which would crash on the metal saucepan below, waking him up. He would then write down all of the creative ideas that were flooding his dreaming mind. Genius, wouldn’t you agree?

CONTROLLING YOUR DREAMS—LUCIDITY

No chapter on dreaming can go unfinished without mention of lucidity. Lucid dreaming occurs at the moment when an individual becomes aware that he or she is dreaming. However, the term is more colloquially used to describe gaining volitional control of what an individual is dreaming, and the ability to manipulate that experience, such as deciding to fly, or perhaps even the functions of it, such as problem solving.

The concept of lucid dreaming was once considered a sham. Scientists debated its very existence. You can understand the skepticism. First, the assertion of conscious control over a normally non-volitional process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience we call dreaming. Second, how can you objectively prove a subjective claim, especially when the individual is fast asleep during the act?

Four years ago, an ingenious experiment removed all such doubt. Scientists placed lucid dreamers inside an MRI scanner. While awake, these participants first clenched their left and then right hand, over and over. Researchers took snapshots of brain activity, allowing them to define the precise brain areas controlling each hand of each individual.

The participants were allowed to fall asleep in the MRI scanner, entering REM sleep where they could dream. During REM sleep, however, all voluntary muscles are paralyzed, preventing the dreamer from acting out ongoing mental experience. Yet, the muscles that control the eyes are spared from this paralysis, and give this stage of sleep its frenetic name. Lucid dreamers were able to take advantage of this ocular freedom, communicating with the researchers through eye movements. Pre-defined eye movements would therefore inform the researchers of the nature of the lucid dream (e.g., the participant made three deliberate leftward eye movements when they gained lucid dream control, two rightward eye movements before clenching their right hand, etc.). Non-lucid dreamers find it difficult to believe that such deliberate eye movements are possible while someone is asleep, but watch a lucid dreamer do it a number of times, and it is impossible to deny.

When participants signaled the beginning of the lucid dream state, the scientists began taking MRI pictures of brain activity. Soon after, the sleeping participants signaled their intent to dream about moving their left hand, then their right hand, alternating over and over again, just as they did when awake. Their hands were not physically moving—they could not, due to the REM-sleep paralysis. But they were moving in the dream.

At least, that was the subjective claim from the participants upon awakening. The results of the MRI scans objectively proved they were not lying. The same regions of the brain that were active during physical right and left voluntary hand movements observed while the individuals were awake similarly lit up in corresponding ways during times when the lucid participants signaled that they were clenching their hands while dreaming!

There could be no question. Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming. Other studies using similar eye movement communication designs have further shown that individuals can deliberately bring themselves to timed orgasm during lucid dreaming, an outcome that, especially in males, can be objectively verified using physiological measures by (brave) scientists.

It remains unclear whether lucid dreaming is beneficial or detrimental, since well over 80 percent of the general populace are not natural lucid dreamers. If gaining voluntary dream control were so useful, surely Mother Nature would have imbued the masses with such a skill.

However, this argument makes the erroneous assumption that we have stopped evolving. It is possible that lucid dreamers represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens’ evolution. Will these individuals be preferentially selected for in the future, in part on the basis of this unusual dreaming ability—one that may allow them to turn the creative problem-solving spotlight of dreaming on the waking challenges faced by themselves or the human race, and advantageously harness its power more deliberately?