A researcher at UC Berkeley says that the ability to form memories relating to specific events, places, and times (episodic memory, or fact-based memories, as opposed to procedural memory) deteriorates with accrued wakefulness, and that sleeping helps move short-term memories into long-term memory, thus allowing more information to go into short term memory later (which can then go into long-term memory), and thus facilitates learning.

“[A] study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.”

This article is about a snake-like robot that can roll up a pole for doing things such as inspecting oil and gas pipelines or the underside of a bridge. The robot’s designer, Dennis Hong, says the idea for the robot came to him in a dream.

In the episode about notebooks, http://explodingcreativity.com/2008/07/notebooks, I mentioned one use for a notebook is as a dream log. The hard part of mining your dreams for ideas is remembering the dreams. Writing them down helps us remember them and then to associate the dreams with new ideas or whatever we’re working on at the time.