“One theory of creative problem solving is that during wake, you become fixated on an incorrect solution path, and then you forget that during sleep,” Konkoly says. That allows your mind to find the right answer, without interference. Asking people to bring deliberate focus to solving a puzzle during a lucid dream might prevent that forgetting, she speculates. 

Another theory is that lucid dreams might be too much like waking consciousness to help with solving problems. “Your unconscious mind has all this plurality of simultaneously thinking about 10 things at once…It’s not limited by a single track,” Paller muses. “And maybe that’s more creative, in a sense. Maybe lucidity is therefore antagonistic, because you want to not just focus on one thing, but focus on a whole bunch of things.”

The results tally with findings from other work on dreaming and creativity, says MIT’s Stickgold, who was not involved in the study. He points to a 2023 study from his group, led by Adam Horowitz, in which subjects were asked before sleeping to dream of trees. Upon waking, they were presented with tests of creativity around the theme of trees. While the study couldn’t control for what people were thinking about before they went to sleep, the way Paller and Konkoly’s study does, “the more references they had to trees in their dreams, the more creative they were,” Stickgold says. That suggests that priming people to dream about a subject can change how they think about it later.