Are you a lucid dreamer? If you don’t know what that means, it’s a superpower that anyone can activate with a little work. Lucid dreamers are self-aware when they are dreaming, rather than just trapped in it, as most of us are. They can direct the course of their dream like a director creating a movie. And now we learn that there’s a practical use for this rather esoteric skill. A recent study (Konkoly et al., 2026) found that lucid dreamers increased their waking puzzle-solving ability by 30 percent by giving the problems to their sleeping minds to solve. In a fascinating twist, each puzzle was accompanied by a unique piece of music, which was then played as the participants slept, to remind them to work on the puzzle while dreaming.

How does lucid dreaming work, and how can you learn to do it? Years ago, I took part in a lucid dreaming study. I was in graduate school and, thus, needed money – so when I saw a request at my university for volunteers to help study the efficacy of dreams, and it was paying, I jumped at it. I figured sleeping would be a pretty easy way to make money.

The results were surprising. First, the psychologist leading the study taught us how to have lucid dreams. That was a rather tedious, but easy, process of writing down our dreams upon first waking in the morning. We were instructed to keep a notebook and pen beside our bed and to write down as many dreams as we could recall before getting up. We were told to stay in the sleeping position, grab the pen and notebook, and write as best we could, as fast as possible, with our eyes mostly shut – which kept us in the dream state, though it made for some indecipherable scribbles.

Within a few weeks, we subjects found we were remembering more and more of our dreams. And then, one by one, we achieved the breakthrough: we started being aware we were dreaming while we were still asleep.

The results were extraordinary. First, I resolved a recurring nightmare I’d had for years by successfully escaping the evil mastermind who had kept me prisoner in his mountaintop castle. I’ll spare you the details – but once I escaped, I never had the dream again.

Second, I had been struggling with stress over the several roles I was juggling as a new graduate student: taking classes, teaching undergraduates, and trying to earn enough money on the side to make it all work. It seems quaint now, but at the time it was all I could handle alongside the responsibilities of being a newly minted young father. In one of my lucid dreams, I conjured an image of myself as a beatifically calm, Buddha-like monk sitting in the lotus position – with three eyes in my head. The feeling was a deep sense of calm, relief, and even joy, because I could see so clearly. In talking it over with the psychologist, we realized the three “eyes” were actually three “I”s – the roles I was playing: student, teacher, father. By integrating them all into one happy meditator, I told myself it was going to be fine. I didn’t change the stressors, but I did change my reaction to them.

If you want to increase your puzzle-solving ability by 30 percent – and maybe resolve a few difficult personal challenges at the same time – try lucid dreaming as an alternative to therapy or some other brain-boosting method. After all, it’s so easy you can do it in your sleep!