Those Who Know They’re Dreaming Are Savvier When Awake
Source: theatlantic.com
It’s probably fair to assume that at this moment, you are, in fact, awake. You’re reading; you’re scrolling; sometime in the not-too-distant past, you somehow made your way to The Atlantic’s website. All waking activities.But let’s say, hypothetically, that as you’re reading this, the floor and everything else beneath you dissolve, leaving your body floating where your chair had been seconds before. No one around you seems to think this is odd; they’re all floating, too.
There are a few options here. One, you can panic, because why is the floor gone?
Two, you can roll with it, because cool, gravity’s gone.
Or three, you can evaluate your surroundings, realize that neither the floor nor gravity is really going anywhere, and conclude that you must be dreaming.
Research suggests that there may be a benefit to option three: Lucid dreamers, or people with the ability to recognize their dreams as they’re happening, may be better at problem-solving during their waking hours.In a study recently published in the journal Dreaming, psychologists from the University of Lincoln in the U.K. divided 68 undergraduate volunteers into three groups based on the self-reported frequency of their lucid dreaming—never, occasionally, or at least once a month. The participants were then asked to complete a series of word puzzles by identifying one word that linked three other words appearing on the screen. (The word linking “aid,” “rubber,” and “wagon,” for example, would be “band.”) On average, those who frequently had lucid dreams solved 25 percent more of the puzzles than those who had none.
According to study author Hannah Shaw, lucid dreaming may indicate a greater capacity for insight, which the researchers defined as “a lightbulb moment, or an ‘aha’ moment,” she explains in an email. “It appeared that lucid dreamers showed the ability to see the more remote connections needed to solve the [word] problems.”
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But there may be a downside to frequent lucid dreaming, cautions Patrick McNamara, a professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine: “We don’t know if you get sleep-deprived when you lucid dream.” The prefrontal cortex, which governs higher cognitive functions like self-awareness, typically shuts off during REM sleep (the state where lucid dreaming occurs). In people experiencing lucidity, though, it remains active. For this reason, some experts believe that lucid dreaming isn’t really dreaming at all, but rather a state that exists somewhere in the no-man’s land between sleep and wakefulness—meaning it’s still unclear whether lucid dreaming has the same energy-replenishing properties as regular shut-eye.
Read the full article at: theatlantic.com
