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Creative breakthroughs during sleep
While teaching a summer course at University College London in 2011, I came across a unique set of dreams recorded in the archives of the Wellcome Library Medical Collection: those from British officers in a World War II Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. From 1940 to 1942, Major Kenneth Hopkins had gathered dream accounts every morning from 79 fellow prisoners being held in Laufen Castle in Bavaria. Hopkins planned to use the data for his dissertation research, but he died of a lung ailment in the camp. These dreams sat unread for decades.
A group of undergraduate students and I scored these accounts using standardized scales that rate dreams for their emotions, types of social interactions, and categories of characters, settings, and objects. We compared the ratings for the soldiers' dreams to those for dreams from college males of the same time period. Predictably, perhaps, the prisoners' dreams had more references to food and dead people, and they contained less friendliness, sexuality, and aggression.
The biggest surprise in the Laufen dreams lay outside our statistical analyses. A small number of the subjects reported dreams about escape. The men who had such dreams usually did so just once, typically expressing a negative attitude toward the idea. Three prisoners recorded several escape dreams each, however, and their dreams were predominantly positive. Some were explicit, as in the case of one who dreamed he and three others snuck out of the prison dressed as Nazi officers and found a car to drive over the Czechoslovakian border, whereupon the dreamer "woke up sweating although with effort not with fear."
In researching the Laufen,camp, I came across references to "The Laufen Six," a group who escaped from the camp, which the Nazis had been touting as escape-proof. We were amazed to realize that the escapees managed this daring getaway on the same day that three dreamers disappeared from Hopkins's dream data: Three of the six widely celebrated heroes were in the data set, and all three had dreamed repeatedly about escape before they successfully broke out of prison in real life.
Problem-solving and emotional changes in dreams are difficult to study rigorously. In this case, though, the prisoners' daytime escape plans clearly affected their dreams. Possibly the...