People who engage in what's called lucid dreaming - knowing they are asleep and having dreams - are better at solving problems than the average person, new research shows.
Researchers at the University of Lincoln in the U.K. study the phenomenon of lucid dreaming in their probe. They stated that these people are able to lucid dream because they have a higher level of insight. Their brains detect they are in a dream because the events in their dreams otherwise do not make sense.
"It is believed that for dreamers to become lucid while asleep, they must see past the overwhelming reality of their dream state, and recognize that they are dreaming," lead researcher Dr Patrick Bourke, Senior Lecturer at the Lincoln School of Psychology, said in a press release. "The same cognitive ability was found to be demonstrated while awake by a person's ability to think in a different way when it comes to solving problems."
For the study, researchers assessed 68 participants aged between 18 and 25. Each subject experienced levels of lucid dreaming varying from once, to several times a month. Researchers asked them to solve 30 problems tailored to test their insight.
Researchers stated that each problem consisted of three words that could be combined with a fourth solution word to create a new word. For instance, the word "stone" could be linked to words such as "sand", "mile" and "age".
According to the study's findings, lucid dreamers solved 25 percent more of the insight problems compared to the non-lucid dreamers.
Lucid dreaming was the crux of the 2010 film Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In the film, dreamers were able to spot incompatibilities within their reveries.
The study was published in the journal Dreaming.
