THE MOLECULE OF MOREformed a ring. Like the snake with its tail in its mouth—complete in
and of itself—dreams are inner representations of inner ideas. Cut off
from the senses, dreams allow dopamine to run free, unconstrained by
the concrete facts of external reality.
Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Har-
vard Medical School, notes that it’s not surprising that the answer to
Kekulé’s problem took a visual form. Much of the brain is every bit as
active during dreaming as it is when it is awake, but there are crucial
differences. Not surprisingly, the parts of the brain that filter seemingly
irrelevant details, the frontal lobes, are shut down. But there is increased
activity in an area called the secondary visual cortex. This part of the
brain doesn’t receive signals directly from the eyes, which receive no
input during dreaming. Instead, it is responsible for processing visual
stimuli. It helps the brain make sense of what the eyes are seeing.
Dreams are highly visual. In her book The Committee of Sleep: How
Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—and How
You Can Too, Dr. Barrett explains that just as Kekulé discovered the struc-
ture of benzene in a dreamlike state, ordinary people can use dreams to
solve practical problems, too. Dr. Barrett put the problem-solving power
of dreams to the test in a group of Harvard undergraduate students.
She asked them to choose a problem that was important to them.
It could be personal, academic, or more general. Next she taught them
dream incubation techniques. These are strategies people can use to
increase the likelihood of having a problem-solving dream. The stu-
dents wrote down their dreams every night for a week or until they
believed they had solved their problem. The problems and the dreams
were then submitted to a panel of judges who decided if the dream
really did provide a solution.
The results were striking. About half the students had a dream
related to their problem, and 70 percent of those who dreamed about
the problem believed their dreams contained a solution. The indepen-
dent judges mostly agreed. Among the students who had a dream about
their problems, the judges deemed that about half offered a solution.
One of the students in the study was trying to decide what kind
of career he would pursue after graduation. He had applied to two