Unscientific Dream Experiments

Fifteen years ago, the therapist I was seeing suggested that as I was trying to fall asleep, I think about nice things I wanted to dream about. I’d think about Lisa Frank unicorns in sunny fields. Didn’t work.

Earlier this week, I saw an article shared on BlueSky that terrified me: “Did Scientists Just Achieve Inception?” My first thought was, fuck, they’re going to put advertising in our dreams.

The article discusses an experiment where a puzzle is paired with a sound. While the subjects sleep, the sound is played, and then subjects were asked to report if they dreamed of the puzzle.

Once the subjects were awake, the researchers asked them about their dreams. As hoped, many dreamers recalled fragments or ideas from the puzzles. Even more intriguing, 12 of the 20 participants experienced a level of dream engineering that resulted in specific puzzles being “prompted” more than the puzzles that did not have their associated soundtracks played during REM sleep.

That is really interesting, and makes me hopeful that could integrated into insomnia therapy or PTSD therapy.

“If scientists can definitively say that dreams are important for problem solving, creativity, and emotion regulation, hopefully people will start to take dreams seriously as a priority for mental health and wellbeing,” the researcher explained.

I can personally, personally, tell you (and have and am and will tell you) how important dreams are to health. I don’t like the tone of using “dream engineering” to help solve problems: it’s not ads in our dreams, but it is capitalism in our dreams. One must literally be productive AT ALL TIMES.

But that’s one’s quote in one article. Such a statement probably helps generate interest and funding, etc etc. Or I guess solving problems in my dreams beats what’s usually happening in my dreams.

As a very unscientific experiment, I thought about a place I wanted to dream about. Didn’t play any music or anything, just tried to concentrate.

I dream about a bookstore sometimes. It is small, L-shaped, with a long dark table for studying. The location always feels as if it’s underground; I think my brain is basing the location on The Creamery Building in Lincoln, NE. Now that the building is used for retail, there are strange half-flights of stairs and the entire first floor sort of feels like a cellar.

I loved visiting The Creamery Building. Ivanna Cone remains some of the best ice cream I ever had. If I’m going to dream about places from my past, this is an excellent location. Strangely, when I lived in Lincoln, there was a bookstore in that building, but it looked nothing like my dream store. Brains are weird.

Upon waking, I reflected on my dreams. I dreamt of a library.