ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Deirdre Barrett's recent studies on dreams and creative problem solving. The first stage of Deirdre Barrett's inquiry into problem solving and creative dreams was library research. Deirdre Barrett examined 1,910 dreams from 191 subjects and found that flying dreams were likelier to be reported by subjects having lucid dreams or any of three related categories: pre-lucid dreams, dreams about sleep, and false awakenings. She found that daydreams contained more friends, strangers, and happiness, while nighttime dreams had more family members, more negative emotions, and not surprisingly more dream-like distortions and discontinuities. She have conducted a number of studies on people who have a particular disorder or who have had some unusual, and potentially traumatizing, life experience. She also examined how these are reflected in their dreams. In patients who had not developed full-blown Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), posttraumatic nightmares faded over time, interwove with other issues, or evolved into scenarios of mastery.
