Dreams may help you solve problems—and researchers have proof
New studies show what you think about during the day influences your dreams, and that dreams can actually help you work through creative problems.
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The age-old advice to "sleep on it" has science behind it, according to two recent studies examining how dreams help process problems and generate solutions.
One study from the University of Freiburg, published in Communications Psychology in April, tracked the daily lives and nightly dreams of more than 3,000 participants aged 18 to 70 between 2020 and 2024. Researcher Valentina Elce found that daily activities show up in dreams, though reinterpreted in highly metaphorical ways. "Dreams might help us to process the experiences and the emotional charge that we have during the day," Elce told Bob McDonald, host of Quirks & Quarks.
Attention span matters too: people who daydream or let their minds wander during waking hours tend to have shorter, more fragmented dreams. Those who prioritize their dreams—talking about them, trying to remember them—develop more vivid, complex ones. Elce recommends logging what was going through your mind when you wake, even if it's just "I don't remember." "Doing this every day will make you remember more dreams," she said. "It worked on more than 200 people. I had no participants who didn't remember."
A second study from Northwestern University tested whether dreams can actually solve creative problems. Researcher Karen Konkoly, now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, recruited lucid dreamers—people aware they're dreaming and able to control the dream while asleep—to test if they could interact with them during sleep. "One reason sleep helps is because it allows your fixation on the wrong solution to fade," Konkoly said, "and it allows your networks in your brain to be more loosely activated." The research, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness earlier this year, suggests sleep may genuinely help some people find answers to problems they're working on.
