# Sleeping on it

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2026-07-01

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One of my favorite "moves" is to give myself a day to process an important decision by "sleeping on it". While I feel like I generally tend to move quickly on things and I like being decisive, sometimes it's important to let a situation marinate and let some background processing happen.

This background processing is important. This article from MIT makes an interesting observation:

"as we enter a dreamlike state, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, responsible for keeping impulses in check, slowly grows less active. This is when there’s a spur in theta waves that leads to an unconstrained window of consciousness; there is little censorship from the mind, allowing for visceral dreams and creative thoughts."

([Why do we dream?](https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2022/08/01/why-do-we-dream/) by Shafaq Zia)

In other words, dreaming (sleeping on it) gives your brain a unique opportunity to process thinking, unbothered by your daily guard rails.

Interesitngly, AI systems are now forming up to do something similar. From the Anthropic / Claude docs on their dreaming feature:

"Agents write to their memory stores as they work, but these writes are local and incremental: over many sessions a memory store accumulates duplicates, contradictions, and stale entries.

Dreams let Claude clean that up. A dream reads an existing memory store alongside past session transcripts, then produces a new, reorganized memory store: duplicates merged, stale or contradicted entries replaced with the latest value, and new insights surfaced."

([Claude docs on Dreams](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/dreams))

Both are a great reminder that some of your best thinking can happen when you're not even really trying. And, the more time / opportunity you can give yourself to sleep on it, the better. Clearly, this is core component of any Slow Hunch.

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/sleeping-on-it)*