Dreaming, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1993

The “Committee of Sleep”: 
A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving 

Deirdre Barrett^{[1] [2]}

  Subjects incubated dreams addressing problems chosen by the dreamer nightly for one week. Approximately half recalled a dream which they judged to be related to their problem; a majority of these believed their dream contained a solution. Problems of a personal nature were much more likely to be viewed as solved than ones of an academic or general objective nature. Independent judges rated slightly fewer dreams as either addressing or solving the problems than did the dreamers, but the trends of their conclusions followed the same patterns as those of the dreamers.

KEY WORDS: dreaming; problem solving; creativity; dream incubation.  

The French Surrealist poet, St. Paul Boux, would hang a sign on his bedroom door before retiring which read: “Poet at work.” (Gumpertz, 1976, p. 161). A similar belief in nocturnal productivity was expressed by John Steinbeck: “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” (Running Press, 1988, p. 88). A shorter version of this has become the cliché “Sleep on it!”

None of these quotes designate the dream as spokesperson for the committee of sleep. However most accounts of solving problems or producing creative products during sleep are of REM-like dreams or hypnogogic imagery. In the most famous and controversial example, the chemist Kekulé reported that his Nobel-prize winning realization of the structure of the benzene molecule as hexagonal rather than straight came after dreaming of a snake grasping its tail in its mouth (Ramsay and Rocke, 1984). Mendeleev described dreaming the periodic table of the elements in its completed form (Kedrov, 1957, pp. 91-113). The Nobel-prize winning experiment demonstrating the chemical transmission of nerve impulses to a frog's heart was conceived by Otto Loewi in a dream (Dement, 1974, p. 98).

Inventions as varied as Elias Howe's sewing machine needle—with the hole at the pointed end (Kaempffert, 1924. p. 385) and J. B. Parkinson's computer-controlled anti-aircraft gun (Fagen, 1978. p. 135) have reportedly been conceived in dreams. William Blake described being told by his dead brother in a dream about a new way to engrave his illustrated songs which he found worked well (Diamond, 1963, p. 17). Coleridge (1895) states in the preface to “Kubla Khan” that the poem appeared complete in an opium-induced dream, and Robert Lewis Stevenson (1925) dreamed the two key scenes of his novel,  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Music pieces which were heard by their composers in dreams include Tartini's “Devil's Trill” (Ellis, 1911, p. 286), and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Scholar Herman Hilprecht reported that he dreamed an Assyrian priest came to him and revealed the accurate translation of the stone of Nebuchadnezzar (Van de Castle, 1971. p. 1). In modern times, Jack Nicklaus credited a crucial improvement in his golf game to dreaming of a new way to grasp his club (Dement, 1974, p. 101).

Dream psychologists and historians take a variety of stances toward such anecdotes. Wotiz and Rudofsky (1984) have suggested that Kekulé confabulated or lied about the snake image long after publishing his benzene paper to conceal his reliance on earlier chemists' work. However, Ramsay and Rocke (1984) have documented that Kekulé described a dream image from his first presentation of the paper, appropriately cited his predecessors, and that much of Wotiz and Rudofsky's argument rested on faulty translations of German documents. Blagrove (1992) asserts that, on principle, none of these anecdotes could be accurate. He argues that dreams, by their very nature, cannot even intend to solve a problem, much less do so:   “. . .   the place for problem-solving is the waking, social world.” (p. 24)

Others not only believe such problem solving occurs spontaneously, but also advocate cultivating it by dream incubation.. (Garfield, 1974; Reed, 1976; Delaney, 1979). Garfield writes: “Once your dream state has provided you with your own poem, or painting, or solution to a problem, you know. Ever after you will be able to seek inspiration and help from your dream state.  Those who do not 'believe in dreams   . . .   have only nonsensical ones.' (p. 199-200)

Several research studies have examined different aspects of problem solving and dreams. Wile (1934) addressed the incubation issue when he measured how long it took children to self-induce a dream on a desired topic. The average time was 5 weeks; the shortest was 2 weeks, the longest 6 months. Wollmering (1978) found that in an even shorter period of time, 38% of young adult subjects could learn to alter the outcomes of their dreams in ways they selected before sleep.

Cartwright (1974) had subjects try to solve three types of problems: crossword puzzles, word association tests, and story completion. Before giving their answers, they were given either a sleep period that included at least one REM interval or an equivalent amount of waking time. The first two types of problems were judged for correctness, and no differences were found between having sleep-with-REM vs. a waking interval. Story completions were judged for optimistic vs. negative ending; sleep with REM produced more negative endings. However the experiment did not attempt to evaluate the quality of stories.

Dement (1974) gave 500 undergraduate students three "brain-teaser" problems to read over before going to sleep and to note whether they had solutions in their dreams that night. Of 1,148 attempts at solving problems, 87 dreams addressed the problem without finding a solution. Seven students reported dreams which solved the problem and a few others had dreams which seemed to hint at the solution without the waking subject catching the hint. An example of the latter was dreamed in response to the problem: "HIJKLMNO: what one word does this sequence represent?" The subject reported: “I had several dreams all of which had water somewhere   . . ."   and described the water in each dream. However his guess at the solution to the problem was "alphabet" rather than "water" (=H2O).

Morton Schatzman (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1986) has repeated this experimental paradigm, giving brain-teasers to huge numbers of people in England via the mass media. He has received dozens of examples of dreams solving those problems although he has no way of ascertaining the total number of people who may have been trying to incubate the solutions. Like Dement, he has observed some dream examples which seem to contain solutions without the dreamer having caught on.

For the present experiment, it was decided to explore what subjects would do with solving problems of their own choice. Although these lack a definitive criteria for quality of solutions, they have an immense advantage in terms of relevance and motivation. They parallel spontaneous, and especially clinical, uses of problem solving much more closely than do “brain teasers.”

  METHOD

Seventy-six college students (47 women, 29 men; ages 19-24, modal age  =  21) were asked to incubate dreams addressing problems as a homework assignment in a class on dreams. They were instructed to select a problem of personal relevance with recognizable solution(s). It could be of a personal, general objective, or academic nature. They were asked to write out the problem in a simple fashion and to follow the dream incubation instructions of Dement (1974). Immediately prior to the first night of dream incubation, they had attended a lecture summarizing the literature on problem solving in dreams. This included the studies reviewed above and a detailed description of the dream incubation techniques of Dement (1974), Garfield (1974), Reed (1976), Delaney (1979), and Schatzman (1983a).

Subjects followed this procedure nightly for one week or until the they had a dream which they felt solved the problem. They recorded all dreams they recalled during this week and noted which ones they thought: A) were on the topic of the problem, including addressing any aspect of the problem or any attempted solution of it and B) of these, ones they believed contained a satisfactory solution to the problem.

Two raters then judged all dreams in the week's journals on criteria A and B above. Dreams deemed by both judges to address or solve problems were used for analysis.

RESULTS

Agreement between judges ranged from 88 to 100%. Agreement of judges with subjects ranged from 75 to 100%. See Table 1.

Table 1. Percentage Agreement between Judges and Subjects on Ratings of Dream Incubation Outcomes

Approximately half of the subjects recalled a dream which they felt was related to the problem. Seventy percent of these believed their dream contained a solution to the problem. A majority of subjects selected problems of a personal nature for incubation. Virtually all of these were either relationship dilemmas or educational/vocational decisions. These problems of a personal nature were much more likely to be viewed as solved by the dreamer than ones of an academic nature. The two objective problems of a medical nature were so much more clearly addressed in the dreams than any other type of objective problem that they are displayed as a separate sub-category. See Table 2.

Independent judges rated slightly fewer dreams as either addressing or solving the problems than did the dreamers, but the trends of their conclusions followed the same patterns as those of the dreamers. 

See Table 3.

The following personal problem example is representative of those which judges and subjects agreed addressed a problem and presented a solution:

Problem:  I have applied to two clinical psychology programs and two in industrial psychology because I just can't decide which field I want to go into. Dream: A map of the United States. I am in a plane flying over this map. The pilot says we are having engine trouble and need to land and we look for a safe place on the map indicated by a light. I ask about MA which we seem to be over right then and he says all of MA is very dangerous. The lights seem to be further west. I wake up and realize that my two clinical schools are both in MA where I have spent my whole life and where my parents live. Both industrial programs are far away, Texas and CA. That was because originally I was looking to stay close to home and there were no good industrial programs nearby. I realize that there is a lot wrong with staying at home and that, funny as it sounds, getting away is probably more important than which kind of program I go to.

Table 2. Subjects'  Ratings of Dream Incubation Outcomes

Table 3. Judges Ratings of Dream Incubation Outcomes

A few dreams were much more literal depictions of problems and their solutions as the following example agreed upon by judges and subjects:

Problem:  I'm accepted at a medical school that is asking that I pay $500 to secure my place by a date before my top three medical schools will have answered. Dream: It was winter and I was getting rejections from everywhere, so I decided I should pay the $500.

The dreams rated by subjects but not by judges as addressing and solving problems were usually more metaphoric as in the following examples:

Problem:  I'm trying to decide whether to be on the softball team again this spring. I love it, but practice does take time away from my studies. I could just go to watch the games this year and still see my friends from the team. Dream: I'm camping in an open place in a tent that doesn't come all the way to the ground. People are all around staring at me. I feel very uncomfortable and exposed. Solution: The dream reminded me of the phrase “a watcher rather than a doer” which has very negative connotations for me. I don't think I'd be happy with just going to the games.

The only two medical problems resulted in dreams viewed as both addressing and solving those problems by judges. The first one was viewed as presenting a solution by the subject also. The second one constituted the only time the judges viewed a dream as presenting a plausible solution while the subject viewed it as only presenting the problem:

Problem:  I've been having major problems with my menstrual cycle and my doctor can't figure out what is wrong. Dream: my doctor told me I was having a reaction from being on a diet and exercising more than I ever have. In the dream, my doctor gave me medicine to correct this and I would be fine if I took this medicine. In waking life, he did ask about diet and I didn't tell him how much I'm dieting; he's never asked about exercise. I guess I should tell him about the diet and exercise, huh?

Problem:  Whether I had taken my medicine. I'm supposed to take just one of these pills a day; it's bad if I take more than one or miss one. I couldn't remember this day if I had taken it and I was really worried. Dream: I was drinking water and swallowing pills over and over, it just went on with me drinking and taking pills for a long time.

The only non-medical objective problem that was judged to be solved was the following:

Problem:  I recently moved from one apartment to a smaller one. Every way I try to arrange my bedroom furniture in the new room looks crowded. I've been trying to decide if there is a better way or if I have to get rid of something. Dream: I come home and all the boxes are unpacked and the pictures hung. Everything looks real nice. The little chest of drawers is in the living room up against a wall like a sideboard and it blends right in there. I'm puzzled because I didn't remember doing this. I can't figure out if I moved the chest and unpacked or if someone else has, but I like it. Awake: The chest actually fit there real well when I tried it, so I left it there.

DISCUSSION

Subjects in this study were unusually interested in dreams and had been exposed to some problem-solving success stories. Obviously they are unrepresentative of the general population and therefore one would not expect this study to typify what happens by way of spontaneous problem solving in dreams. However, these subjects' characteristics and preparation make them highly comparable to clients of therapists who use these techniques and to readership of self-help books which advocate such techniques.

The results of the present study would lead one to expect that about half of such therapy clients or self-help practitioners would experience themselves as influencing their dream content toward a specified problem and about a third of them would report a solution appearing in a dream. These are similar to conclusions of earlier studies (Wile, 1934; Wollmering, 1978).

The types of problems viewed as solved in the present study are consistent with dream anecdotes which feature personal problems much more so than academic ones. Personal problems are the ones to which most psychotherapists apply dream incubation techniques (Garfield, 1974; Reed, 1976; Delaney, 1979.) Another category which looks strong in this study, but is far too small to generalize from is that of medical problems. Again there are many anecdotes about such problems (Garfield, 1991) and some preliminary research to suggest the body can sense (Smith, 1990), and even present solutions (Kasatkin, 1967) to health problems.

Although this study was not set up to rigorously evaluate the quality of the solutions, many of them appear to be ones of which the dreamers were not already consciously aware. The solutions seem to be in line with the subjects' waking abilities. The dreams help when dreamers are stuck in their waking decisions but do not represent dramatically different intellectual faculties. This is consistent with the anecdotal literature: it is known composers who dream great music, established writers who dream classic poetry, and top scientists who have Nobel material arrive in their dreams.

Dream novelty is optimal in open-ended problems without known solutions such as the furniture arranging example quoted above. Problems framed as a dichotomous choice between two already conceived solutions obviously have a better chance of the dream “offering” a solution but less likelihood of novelty. However, some dreams on dichotomous problems did offer novel solutions as in the example of choosing between two types of graduate programs being reframed into the issue of their locations vis a vis separation from family and home. Other dichotomous problems were answered with dreams that favored one choice over another. Some of these afforded their dreamers a sense of resolution. Here the “solution” aspect lay in emotional release from one side of their ambivalence rather than from novelty.

There are potential dangers in automatically taking a dream as the “right answer” in making decisions. Class lectures and reading had emphasized dream solutions only as material to examine from a waking perspective. However, this experiment occurred at a religious college and several of the responses indicated a firm conviction that dreams came from God and that therefore, a dreamed solution should definitely be followed. That dreams on dichotomous problems could occur arbitrarily on either side of the ambivalence was illustrated best by the following example:

Problem:  My boyfriend plans to join the army full-time after graduation (he's in the reserves right now). He has asked me to marry him and wants me to go with him wherever he is assigned. I don't know if I want to be an army wife. I am very scared and confused about what to do. Dreams: The first night I was incubating this problem. I dreamed we were with his mother and her seven foster children. We were happy and holding hands. The second night I incubated it, I dreamed we were at the country club where I work having our wedding reception. Everyone was laughing and dancing, just having a good time. He had a tux on and I had a wedding gown on and I was very much in love with him. I thought that was a solution. Several nights later after I had stopped incubating the problem, I dreamed we were about to get married and I was begging the people that were with me not to make me do it. I kept saying “Please don't make me do it! I don't want to marry him! PLEASE!” I remember feeling very frightened and very alone. I felt like if I married him my life would end.

Although we have thus far been referring to dreams as “solving problems,” one of the more interesting qualities of these dreams is that they appear more to be presenting to the dream ego a solution which has been arrived at by the start of the dream. One does not see the problem being struggled with except in a few of the examples judged to be addressing but not solving the problem. Sometimes the dream ego gets the point late in the dreams as in the example of the clinical vs. industrial graduate school map; however some other agency in the dream (in this case the pilot) seems to have prepared the solution in advance. In the furniture arranging example, the dream ego arrives home to find the solution that has already happened. This is consistent with previous examples cited by Dement (1972) and Schatzman (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1986). Some of their longer examples of objective logical solutions being presented begin with subtle hints building toward more obvious ones until the dream ego “gets it.”

Perhaps the “committee of sleep” may have workers outside of REM and the “spokesperson” role of the dream may be more than a metaphor. Even more likely, given what is known about cortical activation, the problem may get solved by some part of the waking mind and communicated to consciousness only in the dream state.

In summary, there remain many questions about the mechanism of problem solving in dreams and about the quality of these solutions compared with waking ones. It is clear, however, that dream-interested persons incubating problems can often dream what they feel to be solutions of which they are not consciously aware and that such dreams can provide them considerable personal satisfaction.

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