Dreams are not “mean­ing­less nar­ra­tives” but are “lay­ered with sig­nif­i­cance and sub­stance”, laments insom­niac Jonah Lehrer as he con­sid­ers the impor­tance of dream­ing for cre­ativ­ity:

A group of stu­dents was given a tedious task that involved trans­form­ing a long list of num­ber strings into a new set of num­ber strings. This required the sub­jects to apply a painstak­ing set of algo­rithms. How­ever, […] there was an ele­gant short­cut, which could only be uncov­ered if the sub­jects saw the sub­tle links between the dif­fer­ent num­ber sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 per­cent of peo­ple found the short­cut, even when given sev­eral hours to mull over the task. How­ever, when [the researcher, Jan Born,] allowed peo­ple to sleep between exper­i­men­tal tri­als, they sud­denly became much more clever: 59 per­cent of all par­tic­i­pants were able to find the short­cut. Born argues that deep sleep and dream­ing “set the stage for the emer­gence of insight” by allow­ing us to men­tally rep­re­sent old ideas in new ways.

So that’s another good rea­son to sleep well.

Before look­ing at how sleep is “an essen­tial com­po­nent of cre­ativ­ity”, Lehrer also describes this fas­ci­nat­ing study: a selec­tion of rodents spent their day run­ning around a cir­cu­lar track, hav­ing their brain activ­ity mon­i­tored. Once the ani­mals fell asleep, the researchers noted that the brain activ­ity dis­played was iden­ti­cal to that dis­played while they were actu­ally run­ning around the track (i.e. they were dream­ing about run­ning). On fur­ther exam­i­na­tion, the researchers then dis­cov­ered that they could also pre­dict pre­cisely where on the track the rodents were at any given point in their dream.