Pre-Ramble:  I have always admired, … no, more than that, … I have always revered people who could get by with very little sleep … folks who could presumably get more awesome things done in a day because they weren’t drooling on a pillow for seven or eight hours a night.

Somewhere I read that geniuses don’t need a lot of sleep — folks like Albert Einstein, Leonardo daVinci, Steven Jobs … Presumably, these guys have more hours in a day to spend on meaningful activities like dreaming up theories and inventing things. I’m sure Steven Jobs has been up these last few nights festering over this and that. 

Well, so, if you’re not sleeping, it is a pretty safe bet that you are also not dreaming.  Which, according to dreaming experts means that you are missing out on a whole other way to think and “find solutions to things that confound us during waking hours.” Research suggests that dreaming, which happens in the state of sleep known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement), has been around for 220 million years and plays an active role in our evolutionary history.

In his book Dream Language (2005), founding director of the DreamScience Foundation and past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Robert J. Hoss describes the brain functions suspected of instigating dreams:

“The brain stem and limbic system act as “activators” of the REM state of sleep we typically associate with dreaming and arouse us into the pseudo-consciousness of REM sleep whereupon the amygdala modulates the internally generated cortical input, thus activating the emotion-related processing that stimulates the dream.”

ZZZzzzz…….

Once thought to be a result of “neurons firing randomly,” dreams are now believed to be “mash-ups created by the subconscious mind as it processes, sorts and stores emotions from the day.”  Rosalind Cartwright professor of neuroscience at Rush University Medical Center and author of a new book titled “The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,” explains that the dreaming mind will recall something that happened during the day and connect it with bits and pieces of older memories that are somehow related … “old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other.”

Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett, suggests that the “highly visual and often illogical” quality of dreams is “simply a different form of thinking” and an avenue by which the brain can engage in out-of-the-box thinking and problem-solving. Barrett has documented the phenomenon in her extensive study of problem-solving in dreams,

“In one experiment, [she] had college students pick a homework problem to solve … Students focused on the problem each night before they went to bed. At the end of the week, about half the students had dreamed about the problem and about one-quarter had a dream that contained the answer.”

Barrett also reviewed scientific and historical literature to find examples of the types of problems most likely to be solved in dreams. Many of these involved problems that required individuals to “visualize something in his or her mind, such as an inventor picturing a new device.” 

The Take-Away: It’s great to know that a few extra hours of shut-eye can actually serve a useful purpose … and that those of us who enjoy 7 or 8 hours a night aren’t automatically relegated to the sloth heap. Sounds like dreamtime can be busy and productive. (Personally, I prefer to use mine to fly.) Steve Jobs might want to tuck himself in early this week and reset the dream-dial to something like “rubber-baby-buggy-bumpers” … And, maybe if Einstein had slept in once in a while, he may have been able to work out that whole Theory of Relativity thing.

Post-Note: Talk about a dream-sequence … check out recently released film, “Inception” written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The plot features a thief who enters the minds of individuals through their dreams to steal – or plant – information. No sleeper, this action packed film is layered with nuance and meaning, lots of shoot ‘em up action, and Leo is looking dreamy.