The benefits of dreaming are far-reaching. When you get enough sleep, the muscular and immune systems are restored, even your wounds heal quicker. Meanwhile, when you dream, you repair your mind and emotions. Strange dreams, in particular, help us adapt to new conditions. But what if you could hack your dreams to improve your creativity too? Scientists are working on it.
Here are five reasons why dreaming is valuable:
1. Improves Memory
A Harvard study found dreams can improve memory. The study involved 99 participants playing a virtual reality maze and remembering all the objects in the maze. Half of the volunteers had a 90-minute nap after the game, and a half (the control group) did not.
And sure enough, those who napped recalled more items than the non-napping group. But, remarkably, those who dreamed of the maze remembered the objects ten times better! According to the Harvard team, dreaming reorganizes and consolidates memory.
2. Aids Emotional Healing
Your dreams are like a night-time therapist. What you see in your dream is not real, but the emotions attached to those dreams are.
While dreaming, the brain can manage highly stressful events by disconnecting emotions from memory. According to Scientific American, these dreams can help us process negative emotions rendering them inactive. This is vital as processing negative emotions can decrease anxiety and depression.
3. Provides Better Sleep
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found dreaming helps you sleep better, while not dreaming can cause sleep disturbance.
4. Helps Overcome Fears
Interestingly, lucid dreamers are aware of being in a dream and can manipulate the dream. You can practice facing fear or anxiety in a lucid dream since you have nothing to lose. In addition, the dream can help reprogram your brain so that you lose the fear when you wake up.
5. Improves Your Mood
A study published in Psychiatry Research found that dreams improve your mood. For example, you can go to sleep in a sad mood, and after dreaming all night, you may wake up happier. The study recruited 60 participants who felt depressed before sleeping. Their dreams would start negatively, but toward the end of the night, they experienced fewer negative dreams. When the participants woke up, they reported waking up in a better mood.
Strange Dreams
A study conducted last year suggests that strange dreams are particularly beneficial. They help our brains generalize our daily experiences in a way that enables deeper learning. According to the research, while a human experiences a weird dream, they expand their brainpower, similar to how artificial intelligence systems are trained to recognize real-world data to become more intelligent.
Almost all mammals and birds dream, but the reason why is unknown. Neuroscientists are divided over if dreaming is a side effect of brain functions or if it serves a unique purpose. However, several theories explain why we dream, including:
- Dreams are needed to build and store our memories.
- They help us psychologically prepare for meeting real-world phenomena.
- Dreams are essential to regulate our emotional health (the grandchild of Freudian theory.)
The study, published in the journal Patterns, proposes a new theory: Dreaming helps our brains comprehend our day-to-day experiences, helping us adapt to unique circumstances. The study’s author, Erik Hoel, Ph.D., from Tufts University in Medford, MA, calls his theory the “overfitted brain hypothesis.”
It is partly based on the learning process of artificial neural networks, which are computer algorithms that search for patterns in extensive data sets. For example, these systems are typically given training data similar to the data they will examine later. Meanwhile, practice data is usually purposefully polluted with extra chaos and noise to prevent “overfitting.” In other words, the disorder can prevent the neural network from becoming too “small-minded” and later unable to recognize the larger picture.
According to Dr. Hoel’s hypothesis, occasionally bizarre dreams with warped perspectives keeps our brains from focusing too much on the specifics of a task and make us better at generalizing. “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world,” states Dr. Hoel. However, Dr. Hoel’s theory does not necessarily reject other hypotheses about sleep or dreaming that have much empirical support.
Dr. Hoel claims that evidence for his theory already exists. For example, repeatedly performing a task while awake will most likely lead to you dreaming about it that night. He suggests that repetitive actions like this activate the brain’s defense against overfitting, and strange dreams are the outcome.
Dream-Hacking
Meanwhile, in 2020, a team of MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group and Dream Lab researchers developed a wearable glove-like device called Dormio, which helps the user track and interact with their dreams to improve their waking life. The glove ultimately gives them control over their dreams. It does so with a host of sensors that detects the wearer’s sleep state. For example, the glove plays a pre-recorded audio cue when the wearer is in the hypnagogic sleep phase.
Whether you’re dealing with creativity challenges, memory issues, anxiety, depression, or you have a massive test to ace, Dormio is the solution. The ultimate goal of this device is to improve memory and creativity.
Dormio is designed to alter dreams by manipulating and extending the hypnagogic stage of sleep (that strange, semi-conscious state we experience before sleeping). Hypnagogia is the brain’s first sleep phase, similar to REM. The main difference between REM and hypnagogia is that we can still hear what’s going on around us in the latter.
Dormio serves as an interface to hypnagogia. The researchers believe this liminal period is a fountain of creativity that gets lost when the person falls into a deep slumber. The hypothesis is that if you can phase into hypnagogia long enough to the point right before you fall asleep then return to consciousness, you’ll benefit creatively from the strange micro-dreams experienced during that transition to sleep.
Once the wearer is in the hypnagogic phase, Dormio delivers audio cues to guide their dream toward a specific theme. Then, while recording the answers, Dormio will prompt them to say what they see in their dream if the wearer starts to fade into a deep sleep.
MIT master’s student Adam Horowits, who led the research, pointed out:
This is unsurprising in light of historical figures like Mary Shelley or Salvador Dalí, who were inspired creatively by their dreams. The difference here is that we induce these creatively beneficial dreams on purpose, in a targeted manner.
Besides Dormio, MIT’s Media Lab is also developing wearable sleep diffusers. These devices will release a scent that the user associates with a positive memory or behavior — which the researchers believe will help improve retention, mood, and sleep quality. In addition, lead researcher Judith Amores is confident that these devices could help trauma victims with PTSD and lingering painful memories. For example, when trauma victims are experiencing a nightmare, the device would release scents associated with a positive memory, allowing them to heal while dreaming.
