It’s like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next?
The team, based at Illinois’ Northwestern University, used a technique known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR) to trigger dreams of puzzles that sleep study participants were unable to solve while awake. According to their findings, among the 12 of 20 participants whose dreams incorporated the cued puzzles, solving rates rose from 20 percent to 40 percent – still not a majority, but a statistically significant jump.
The TMR technique used in the study involved playing certain audio cues while participants tried solving the puzzles in order to associate each puzzle with a specific sound. Researchers then played the sounds linked to unsolved puzzles while participants slept, hoping to prompt recall during dreaming and improve next-day solving.
In other words, the team was trying to determine whether the idiom of sleeping on a problem would actually help participants find a solution, and it appears there’s some truth to that.
The researchers also found that the effect held among the 12 of 20 participants whose dreams incorporated the cued puzzles, even when they were not lucid – that is, not consciously aware they were dreaming or deliberately steering the dream.
The team recruited people with prior lucid-dreaming experience because they are better able to control dream content and search for insight while asleep, but participants were not consistently lucid during the cued dreams.
“Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cueing,” lead author of the paper Karen Konkoly, a researcher at Northwestern’s Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, said of the findings. The results, she added, “showed how dreamers can follow instructions, and dreams can be influenced by sounds during sleep, even without lucidity.”
Of course, any study like this has to be taken with a heap of salt – the sample size was only 20 people, and the researchers admit that their attempts to link dreaming to creativity and problem solving are limited.
“This study design did not allow us to disentangle whether creativity is an inherent function of dreaming versus whether this benefit emerges when combined with pre-sleep intention,” the team noted in their paper. “Further, given that participants could not be fully blinded from the purpose of the study, we cannot rule out the influence of demand characteristics.”
Next up: Subliminal ads?
We reached out to Konkoly to get her take on whether a similar technique could be used to influence people to dream about particular products in a bid to place ads inside dreams, and while we didn’t hear back, there is evidence that it’s been tried before.
Back in 2021, Molson Coors Beverage Company rolled out an unorthodox advertising campaign that invited consumers to try dreaming about Coors. Shut out of running a traditional national Super Bowl ad because of beer-category exclusivity rules, the brewer pitched the stunt as an alternative way to appear during the Big Game.
The Coors Dream Project directed users to a campaign website featuring visual and audio stimuli, including an eight-hour soundscape designed to play while participants slept, which the company said would “shape and compel your subconscious … to dream the Coors Big Game ad.”
The company claimed in press material that trial runs successfully led to volunteers dreaming about “refreshing streams, mountains, waterfalls, and even Coors itself.”
Coors said it was using a technique known as targeted dream incubation in its ad campaign, and that technique gets mentioned in the Northwestern paper as the topic of a prior project Konkoly worked on.
According to that research, reported in October 2025, “dream incubation and TMR can increase dream incorporation of real-world memories.”
It’s unlikely that such techniques could be used on consumers without them noticing at this point, given how such a scheme would require the hijacking of an internet-connected device to play trigger sounds while folks slept. Still, maybe mute that charging smartphone next time you turn in. ®