Business Opportunities Weblog

April 3, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal:

A recent survey commissioned by Staples, the office-supply giant, indicates that 51% of small-business professionals dream about work. Of those, 70% say that when they wake up, they turn their work dreams into action.

Dreams can come true. But if they stumble onto the subject of work, you can only hope in most cases that they won’t. When dreams don’t involve the final exam you never studied for, they frequently seem to be peopled by random colleagues and involve getting places that are never reached and doing tasks that are never done. And you don’t need Freud or Jung to help you decode another category of work dreams in which your psyche’s message repeats the painfully obvious: You need a vacation or a new job. Thanks, genius, for the heads up.

Even the Staples survey acknowledges that the utility of work-related dreams has limits. The survey asked where small business owners got their best ideas, and it found that 39.4% got them while driving and 14.6% while showering. Only 6.3% got them dreaming or lying in bed. Still, bed was more fruitful than brainstorming sessions (6%) or the workplace itself (only 5%).

But there is a growing body of research that indicates that sleep is a time when we can figure out patterns beyond our grasp during the day. In experiments Dr. Stickgold has conducted with puzzles, people tested one morning performed better the next morning than they did if retested later in the day. And it wasn’t just because of the rest. During sleep, the brain engages in processing that explores connections and ideas in trial-and-error fashion.

“What’s getting activated are connections that wouldn’t normally be activated,” he says. The brain’s sleep activity may be “strengthening some of these and weakening others so that the next day you’re functioning in a better milieu.”

Your dreams may be useful to you simply as reminders that you need to address certain issues sooner than their placement at the bottom of your to-do list would suggest.

Photo by PaulMT.

In Health, Stress, Work | 1 Comment