#ThinkfullyHabit: In your dreams
What are the next two letters in this series - O, T, T, F, F…..? Sleep pioneer, William C. Dement, set this challenge to 500 students, with an instruction to think about the problem for 15 minutes before going to sleep and to write down any dreams they remembered as they awoke. If they hadn’t yet solved the problem, they were told to think about the problem for another 15 minutes in the morning. The hope was that their dreams could help.
“Dreams are just thinking in a different biochemical state.”
WHY?
Dreams can be powerful because they are so integral to our thinking processes. Our unconscious mind works with less constraint and continues where our conscious mind leaves off. It’s led psychologists to explore the technique of ‘dream incubation’. This involves self-directing your own dream content by deciding to think about a particular problem before you go to bed, in the hope that your unconscious mind will continue to work away at it while you sleep.
In Dement's study, students submitted their dreams for analysis. 87 dreams related to the problem. Of these, 7 dreams directly solved the problem and a few more included ‘hints’ to the solution. However, psychologist Deirdre Barrett speculated that dreams would be more useful if the problems held more personal meaning for those involved. As such, in her own studies, she asked students to choose their own problem to think about before going to sleep. People were asked to record their dreams for one week and note those dreams which they thought related to their problem or provided a solution. 50% of people had dreams that related to their problem and of these, half again directly included a solution, i.e. 25% of dreams contained a solution.
This is one of those habits that gets easier with practice - the more you try to recall dreams, the better you get. So, think of a problem you’re grappling with just before going to bed. Write it down in summary. Tell yourself you want to dream about the it. When you wake up, before you get distracted by anything else, write down any dreams. If there are no dreams, give it a minute to see if they come back. Then try and connect the dots between your problem and your dream.
It doesn’t automatically follow that solutions should be taken without any further thought. Barrett suggests we treat “dream solutions only as material to examine from a waking perspective.” The integration of waking and dreaming is key.
PSST: If you are still wondering what the solution is, the next two letters are S and S. The sequence OTTFF are the first letters of the numbers one, two, three, four, five. The next two words in the sequence are six and seven.
REFERENCES:
When the Answer Comes in a Dream, Deirdre Barrett, American Scientist, July- August 2020, Volume 108, Number, p200.