Thinking Without Rules
The Cognitive Science of Dreaming
Dreams are strange. One moment you’re back in your childhood home, the next you’re trying to solve a math problem while a parade of penguins marches through your kitchen. The scene shifts without warning, logic takes a back seat, and somehow it all feels, in the moment, perfectly normal.
We often treat dreams as meaningless mental noise or, depending on our leanings, as cryptic messages from the unconscious. However, from a cognitive science perspective, dreams are valuable because they show us a version of the mind thinking without its usual rules and filters.
In waking life, our thoughts are shaped and constrained by external reality. We navigate a world with physical laws, social norms, and consistent cause-and-effect. We have to make sure our reasoning “works” because the stakes are real.
When we dream, those constraints loosen. The brain remains active, especially in REM sleep, but the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive control, logical reasoning, and self-monitoring, becomes less active. Meanwhile, areas tied to emotion, memory, and imagery remain highly active, even hyperactive. The result is thought without a strong referee, where ideas and images are free to collide in ways they never would while awake.
This rule-free thinking has a distinctive texture. The storytelling becomes nonlinear, jumping across time and space without warning. Objects and people can stand in for multiple ideas at once, their identities and meanings shifting mid-scene. The dream’s sense often comes more from feeling than from coherent reasoning, and impossible hybrids of people, objects, and settings appear without explanation or resistance from the dreamer.
In this loosened mental space, unlikely associations can form, sometimes producing flashes of insight that later shape science, art, and technology. Organic chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, for instance, claimed the inspiration for his model of the benzene molecule’s ring structure came after dreaming of a snake biting its tail, the ancient Ouroboros symbol. Dmitri Mendeleev said the final arrangement of the chemical elements periodic table came to him in a dream after years of struggle.
These moments of inspiration are not limited to abstract theory. Elias Howe, frustrated with designing a working sewing machine, dreamed of warriors with spears that had holes near the tip, a vision that inspired the placement of the needle’s eye. Physics Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes said his idea for the laser came to him in a waking spiritual-like epiphany while sitting on a Washington D.C. park bench.
The arts provide equally vivid examples of dreams shaping creative work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge began composing Kubla Khan after a dream, capturing imagery that has since become iconic in discussions of imagination. James Cameron’s fever dream of a metal skeleton emerging from flames became the seed for The Terminator.
What dreams ultimately reveal is that the mind’s default setting is not strictly rational, linear, or rule-bound. Logic is a tool we apply, not an inherent mode of thought. When the structures of waking life are relaxed, the brain naturally shifts into a more associative, emotional, and symbolic mode.
The dream state reminds us that unstructured thought is not inherently wrong. It is different, and sometimes, as history shows, it can lead to breakthroughs that reshape our understanding of the world.
References
Nir, Y., & Tononi, G. (2010, February). Dreaming and the brain: From phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
American Psychological Association. The science of dreaming, with Deirdre Barrett, PhD [Audio podcast episode]. Speaking of Psychology.
DiGiulio, S. (2025). Your weird dreams actually make a lot of sense (according to neuroscience and psychology). NBC News Better.
Cherry, K. (2024, May 16). Why do we dream? Understanding dream theory. Verywell Mind.
Fascinating!