First, if we feed a waking brain with the individual ingredients of a problem, novel connections and problem solutions should preferentially—if not exclusively—emerge after time spent in the REM dreaming state, relative to an equivalent amount of deliberative time spent awake. Second, the content of people’s dreams, above and beyond simply having REM sleep, should determine the success of those hyper-associative problem-solving benefits. As with the effects of REM sleep on our emotional and mental well-being explored in the previous chapter, the latter would prove that REM sleep is necessary
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