Spontaneous Sleep Thinking: Unintentionally Problem-Solving?
As you delve deeper into sleep thinking and become more aware of your thoughts, both while awake and during sleep, you may notice that sometimes upon awaking, you realize that you've sleep-thought without having planned to.
You may remember a dream where you were thinking about a real-life issue and coming up with ideas (sometimes stupid, sometimes brilliant) or you may have dreamt of something that abstractly relates to a waking life situation that has been plaguing your mind (or sometimes even just been living somewhere in a corner of your brain). Or you may have just woken up with newfound clarity and innovative solutions to a problem. This can occur to people even before they are introduced to the concept of sleep thinking.
This just happened to me tonight, and not for the first time, and that's why I decided to write an article about the phenomenon of spontaneous sleep thinking.
My experience with spontaneous sleep thinking
Long before I discovered that one could use sleep intentionally for problem-solving purposes, I remember having that dream where I had to get to some kind of underground train station or something like that, I don't remember it clearly anymore, but the problem was that the place where I had to get was several meters underground and there was no other way to there than to jump or climb the wall. Obviously, that scared me, as heights have always made me feel uneasy (though excited and in awe as well). And then what happened was that there was suddenly a staircase that led down there, and I noticed that not only was it easier to get down there, but the height of the hole or whatever seemed less now than previously. It didn't take me a lot to come to the conclusion that knowing the steps to bringing a idea to fruition not only makes it easier to achieve but also makes the project feel less daunting. That was a very obvious but important message to me at that time as I was just working on embracing my unique nonlinear, bigger picture way of thinking, and this was a necessary call for finding a balance between relying on my strengths and integrating my weaker and less preferred cognitive functions to serve my creative goals. And that absolutely normal, yet significant dream had came to me out of nowhere.
Once I was procrastinating on doing a long and tedious history homework when a dream character that had been following me around and scaring me told me to go do it when I asked her what she wanted from me. It brought this issue that I didn't want to think about to my mind and gave me the necessary boost, putting me in a willing state of mind.
As a multipassionate, meaning, a person who has way to many passions and ideas to be able to reduce themselves to just one, forging a future plan for my life, especially deciding on what to study, is an issue that has been troubling me for years, and I've come a long way to the still quite unclear vision I have now. Yet in a relatively recent dream that I hadn't exactly prompted, I came up with a thought that supports my idea to study medicine. In the dream, I realized that medicine would help me develop all parts of me: strengthen my empathy, yet toughen me up, feed my curiousity, as well as force me to become more organized to get through it all, and, most importantly, whatever work I chose to do in this area would be meaningful (as long as it was ethical, of course). This dream didn't solve all my conundrums and didn't take away my uncertainty, but it for sure gave me a heads-up if I decided to follow this path.
Another time, I was dozing off during a massage as I dreamt of not being able to accomplish a task because I kept being distracted by shiny things until a dream character told me to stop chasing after every shiny thing. Well, duh. But if I had heard this message or thought of it in waking life, it would have barely helped me, after all, my inability to choose is the exact problem. However, in that period of juggling a thousand chores and ideas, it actually shifted my mindset, helping me refocus on what was most important and the projects I was already working on.
Another night, I added an element to my newly formed memory palace (an interesting mnemonic device, maybe I'll explore it on a deeper level and write an article afterwards). Basically, in that dream, I decided that I should sleep-think on the best path to learning a language from scratch and added the thought to the memory palace I had just created in the evening while still awake, and it surprised me a bit. No, I haven't sleep-thought about it yet, since it is not currently a priority.
And tonight, I was thinking about the personality type of a friend of mine, ruled out the other possibilities (although I didn't gave them much thought) and realized that I should look up a specific topic related to the issue.
I have for sure sleep-thought spontaneously at other instances, too, but these are the ones I remember the best at the moment.
So why does this happen?
We usually think of sleep as a pause on living, as this time of unconsciousness and absence of awareness and control over oneself, but it could not be further from the truth. During sleep, we're still thinking, only in a different "mode" if you will, whether we have decided to do that during moments of wakefulness or not.
While sleeping, our minds are free from distractions and external influences, allowing our brains to make new connections, process information, and explore different avenues of thought. During NREM (deep) sleep, memories are reviewed and consolidated in the brain. As we enter the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, our brains become highly active, and this is where the magic of spontaneous sleep thinking often takes place.
Most dreams occur during REM sleep. That's when the brain focuses on creative processing of ideas, exploring various perspectives, generating connections and piecing together fragments of information, as well as healing itself from emotional trauma. This is a time of extra-enhanced creativity, as the mind extracts the core ideas from seas of data and comes up with ideas and solutions. Sleep thinkers usually use this creative state to focus on specific issues, but even if the sleeper does not intentionally decide to sleep-think on a problem, they might adress this issue in sleep anyways.
Benefits of Spontaneous Sleep Thinking
Intentional sleep thinking is without doubt a wonderful tool for harnessing the "superpowers" of sleeping mind to improve the quality of one's life. However, a person may not even want to invest energy into solving all their life issues. Some issues might be associated with too much pain or discomfort, and no matter how honest we attempt to be, there are still truths we prefer to avoid. During sleep, meanwhile, our self-protective walls are lowered, allowing us to access fresh perspectives on a certain issue. Sleep thinking breaks through the defenses of the mind, connecting the dots and bringing our attention truths that we already know even though we don't realize we do. Or maybe we don't want to.
As I mentioned before, sleep thinking is normal thinking, just like wakeful thinking, except the thinking style is different. During sleep (and I'm bringing your attention particularly REM sleep, since that is the one we remember the best), the activity of our mind is very high, processing the events of the day, the information and skills that were learned, and the emotions that were experienced, connecting and combining all those elements in novel ways. This allows us to come up with, for example, solutions that we hadn't actively decided to search for or remember that we have to do the obligations that we want to escape (as it happened with my history project), just as we think without a predefined plan all the time during wakefulness.
Oftentimes, sleep thinking surprises you with a message that is way to obvious to be genius, yet it is a truth lying in a corner of your mind that you had overlooked or ignored, despite its importance. At other times, spontaneous sleep thinking connects the dots for you and provides you with a valuable insight. Yet at still other times, you may simply wake up with your mindset slightly shifted and the solution to a problem more accessible.
Wiring your mind for spontaneous sleep thinking
While we obviously cannot control when or how spontaneous sleep thinking occurs (that's why it is called spontaneous), there are some things we can do to create an environment conducive to fostering its occurrence:
- Prioritize Quality Sleep: Ensure you have sufficient sleep duration and establish healthy sleep habits.
- Cultivate the Right Mindset: Develop an attitude of self-examination, open-mindedness and a willingness to think about your life, including about aspects that make you uncomfortable, especially about those, and solve your problems; learn to let go of your defenses and submit to multi-perspective, whole-picture thinking, striving for constant growth.
- Develop Awareness of Your Sleep Life: Remembering sleep thoughts is crucial to harnessing the power of sleep thinking, therefore I recommend keeping a dream journal where you record any dreams or insights immediately upon waking, or at least spend the first minute of your morning recalling your dreams, as paying attention to your sleeping life will send your brain the message that it is important and you want to remember it.
- Reflect and Act: Review your sleep-inspired ideas (and those of your waking life), reflect on their meaning, and take actionable steps toward implementing them in your waking life.
Embracing the Unexpected
To fully access the power of spontaneous sleep thinking, it's essential to remain open-minded and receptive to unexpected insights. Sometimes, the most profound breakthroughs occur when we least expect them. You must trust the wisdom of your sleeping mind and be willing to explore new perspectives and unconventional solutions. Of course, you must examine an idea before you follow it but listen to it as if it were a member of an inner council. Remember, the path to problem-solving is not always linear, and embracing the unexpected can lead to remarkable discoveries. So, the next time you wake up with a brilliant idea, remember that your mind is a remarkable problem-solver even when you're not consciously aware of it.