Dream Your Way to Success
Dream to solve problems and get answers to your most pressing questions. And why dreams aren't just random firing of synapses.
This is OptimizeHacks, a roundup of Science-based hacks to make you smarter and improve your life, career, health, and business. Instant Appeal:The 8 Primal Factors That Create Blockbuster Success. (HarperCollins)
Today’s topic: Can you program your brain to have a dream to solve a problem? Science says ‘yes’!
Today's Deets:
Why we dream. Dreams are the brain’s way of telling us we need to learn something.
Why our dreams are often so bizarre. To help us better generalize our daily experiences.
Use your dreams to solve problems. Program your mind to have the type of dream you want to have.
Just for Fun: A compilation of 17 hilarious dreams that will keep you up laughing.
An extremely uptight, always-worried-about-his-image “Mr. Corporate General Manager” ex-boyfriend is shirtless, his back covered in pink pansies tattoos, while his forearms bear snake, chain, and spike tattoos. He’s holding a clandestine gambling ring with all of our old college friends in his basement. I’m at the gambling table and casually ask about his tattoos, noting that I had always only seen him in long-sleeved shirts, so I never noticed them before. He responded, “I always kept them covered so you wouldn’t notice.”
What the hell was that dream about?!
That’s usually my first response when waking from a dream like the one described above. On the surface, my dreams rarely make sense. It’s like being in some bizarro funhouse in my mind, with strange characters, unusual places, and visuals and themes that mystify me. I’ve often wondered why I can’t just have a “normal” dream—the kind where I interact with people in my waking life in a clear-cut, make-sense kind of way.
But that’s not how the brain works during sleep.
Why we dream. And why we have bizarre dreams.
The short answer to why we dream is to problem solve and make sense of our daily lives in a way that we are unable to during our waking hours. Specifically, they point out something we need to learn or remember so we can make sense of the events in our lives.
During sleep, the frontal and prefrontal cortices —where logic, planning, and executive functioning occur—take a back seat to the emotional processing (amygdala) and visual processing centers of the brain. Studies have shown that during sleep, our brains tap more deeply into our emotions, and the regions of our brains that register colors, motion, and faces are highly active.
And that explains why we often have bizarre dreams. During sleep, our brains are simply accessing the deep emotional memories we have of a situation, and presenting those in highly visual ways. In our dream state, the clutter and overwhelm of our logic and planning brain areas give way to vivid, highly-emotional and often graphic dreams. And it’s that emotional element that often leads to dreams that produce breakthrough solutions to challenges in our waking lives.
So, what does that dream about my tattoo-covered ex mean? There are a lot of subtexts that I won’t belabor here but, in a nutshell, my subconscious picked up on clues from my waking memories of him. Memories that I had forgotten years ago and had been replaced, in my waking life, with the perfect image he now presented. The dream indicates he’s not who I think he is on the surface, and he’s not the perfect man I was making him out to be in my waking life. (To be clear, he is a good, honorable man. Just not a good man for me.) The contrasting “manly” and pansies tattoos have a whole bunch of other meanings but, on the whole, the dream “solved” the “what if” questions I had been grappling with about our relationship. (What if we had married? What if I had stayed with him? My life would be so much better!) In my waking life, I was putting him on a pedestal—completely forgetting the reasons why, decades ago, I had broken off our relationship after many years of dating. My visual and emotional centers created this highly visual representation to help me understand my true, deep, feelings about our past, and bring back memories of deception in our relationship.
Can you program your mind to have a dream that gives you the answer?
What if you need your dreams to solve a specific problem? Can you really train your brain to have a dream that gives you the insights you need?
As it turns out, yes you can! Let’s look at a few famous examples where dreams led to lightbulb moments and creative breakthroughs:
Jack Nicklaus had a dream that solved his run of poor scores. The dream showed how he needed to change the way he held the club.
Larry Page’s dream that he could download the entire web onto some old computers lying around led to Google. After the dream, he took two years to study and eventually find a way to create the massive search engine. He had that dream during the same night he had an anxiety dream that he was accidentally accepted into Stanford.
Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin literally dreamed up the character one night when she saw the hideous character stretched out on a table.
The sewing machine came about after its inventor, Elias Howe, had a violent nightmare where he was captured by cannibals who said they would kill him if he didn’t invent a sewing machine in 24 hours. He failed, and his captors repeatedly stabbed him with spears that had a hole in the tip. Howe realized in his waking life that string could be threaded through the hole, thus solving the problem he was struggling with in his waking life of how to create a sewing machine.
The double-helix structure of our DNA was discovered after Dr. James Watkins had a spiral staircase dream.
The Theory of Relativity was born from a dream Albert Einstein had of cows huddled in a field near an electric fence. When the farmer flipped on the switch, Einstein saw all of the cows jump back at once; but the farmer saw the cows jump one by one wave-like from the fence. Einstein realized that things look different based on where you’re standing because of the time it takes light to reach your eyes.
Ok, great. But can anyone have lightbulb-moment dreams?
Yes, but….
You have to condition your brain to have such dreams.
Set your dream intention. This is literally what you want to dream about and why. Deeply ponder the problem you are trying to solve right before you go to bed. Write it out.
Visualize the dream you will have. Find a picture that represents the topic you want to dream about. Study it in detail. Notice every little nuance of the picture. Keep this image in your mind as you go to sleep.
Trigger lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams can give you some control over how your dream turns out, or how the problem is solved.
Just for Fun: 17 hilariously weird dreams.
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