Sleep Learning

"Haven't you learned anything in bed?"

—Dean Venture

A character tries to use hypnopædia, aka sleep learning, to crash study for an important upcoming event; a test, a meeting with his boss, something. The technology fails on him, possibly due to outside interference. What he ends up with is a bit of brainwashing. The record got stuck, and repeated one phrase over and over, or the programs were crossed up. In a twist, the random tics the character exhibits as a result end up falling in the exact right places, leading to a sort of Clouseauesque success... at least temporarily.

It's worth noting that, although some people will try to convince you to the contrary, Sleep Learning has been proven to be completely ineffective in Real Life^[1]. Just like its "Evil Twin", Subliminal Seduction.

Compare Hypno Fool. Not to be confused with Asleep in Class, although it's conceivable that an extremely lucky individual would combine the two tropes, by sleeping through class and absorbing the knowledge nevertheless.

Examples of Sleep Learning include:

Anime

• Sumomomo Momomo has Koushi listening to a sleep tape to help him study for his law class. Momoko uses this opportunity to try to suggest romantic things for him to say instead. Koushi wakes up and catches her. The love learning does stick, though, as he ends up repeating them later on...when Iroha sneaks into his bed.
• Played with in Yu Yu Hakusho when Yusuke, as a ghost, is able to appear in Kuwabara's dream strictly to help him study for the upcoming test. It's bizarre, but it works! As a note, the idea that dreams help you learn information you remember is considered quite probable in psychology so this is stretching the truth at worst.
• In Kyou Kara Maou Conrad is able to learn Japanese via sleep learning.
• In 70s Super Robot anime Zambot 3, this is how Kappei, Uchuta and Keiko were taught to pilot the eponymous robot.

Comic Books

• Batman: Jean Paul Valley's father used Sleep Learning learning to make him into Azrael, a Badass angel of vengeance. He was a bookish computer geek, but when triggered, could go up against Batman, whom he briefly replaced. Not bad for listening to a tape in your sleep.
• This is how kids were taught on Silver Age Krypton. Maybe it works better on the Kryptonian mind.

Film

• This technique is the focus of research by the titular hero of the movie The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and its sequel The Monkey's Uncle. Since these are comedy movies by Disney, his results are.. mixed.

Literature

• Quite possibly twisted before it ever got off the ground, in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, where people are made to listen to tapes while sleeping during childhood. Huxley has his fictional conditioning experts explain that hypnopaedia is useless for teaching (one shows a boy who memorized a long lecture on the Nile River without actually learning anything from it, he could repeat the entire passage, but when asked for a specific piece of information from it, he broke down crying); the tapes, therefore, are used only for behavior modification—they contain platitudes intended to subtly reinforce the values of World State society.
• Tape in C. J. Cherryh's Union/Alliance books is Sleep Learning with hypnotic drugs and computer feedback. Citizens use it to learn skills; it is used on azi for almost the entire programming of their minds.
• A king in the Discworld tried to do this by having slaves whisper in his ear. Unfortunately the third one stuck a dagger in it but, "the theory was sound".
  • To elaborate, the King asked a philosopher if he could find an easy way for the King to learn things. The philosopher replies there is no easy way to knowledge, to which the King says he bloody well better find a way or else. Cue the slaves.
• Sleep-learning is used, effectively and with no failures, in the Liaden Universe. (Though the Liaden version of it is a machine based on neural induction technology that works by implanting information into otherwise unused neurons, not the "sleeping with a tape recorder" idea that this trope is mainly about.)
  • In I Dare, Miri relates a bad experience she had with it on Surebleak before being committed to a properly-working machine to find she is a sleep-learning prodigy.
  • In Scout's Progress Aelianna's brother sticks her in a sleep-learning machine with the safety devices removed to punish her for defying him.
  • Sleep-learning does have the disadvantage that knowledge thus obtained needs to be practiced or it will be lost, and seems to have other disadvantages that make it unsuitable to replace schools entirely; otherwise universities such as those seen in Local Custom and Fledgling would no longer exist.
• The War With Mr. Wizzle, the children's novel by Gordon Korman. The girl students try to change the behaviour of teacher Gloria Peabody by playing tapes telling her to be nice while she sleeps. Unfortunately they just make Peabody even crankier because she's not sleeping properly.
• Robert Heinlein was a believer in sleep teaching: he used it in several of his novels.
  • In Glory Road, a (straight) man is taught a foreign language with the aid of an hypnotic trance and a beautiful, nude, woman.
  • Heinlein also used the trope (again for real, not for laughs) in his earlier novel Space Cadet—one of the cadets is given tapes to learn Venusian in his sleep. When he wakes up, he's disappointed that it apparently didn't take—until one of his fellow cadets (a colonist from Venus) cusses in Venusian and the protagonist replies in the same language without even thinking about it.
  • In Citizen of the Galaxy, Thorby is programmed with a message by means of hypnosis and a "sleep instructor".
• The Wayside School books has one student, a Heavy Sleeper, never being disturbed by the others on Ms. Jewell's insistence that she's sleep-learning. At least one tie-in book hints this may be right.

Live Action TV

• An episode of Boy Meets World had Eric Matthews learn to skate by listening to a dieting tape that his friend had dubbed over. Naturally, not all of the original audio was removed, leading him to freak out over, and then run away from, unhealthy food at the end of the episode. In the middle of a date.
• Friends: Chandler borrows a tape to help him quit smoking, which unfortunately offers such encouragement as "You are a strong, confident woman who does not need to smoke". He then spends the rest of the episode behaving in a very effeminate manner, in one of the show's more dim-witted subplots.
• The classic Nickelodeon show Clarissa Explains It All had an episode where Clarissa wanted to memorize all the lines of a play she was starring in overnight (she'd signed up to be the understudy, and didn't expect to need to know it). So she played a recording of the play in her sleep. It seemed to work at first, but then she started reciting lines of the play mixed in, with lines from other famous plays ("If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!") due to tapes causing her to dream of being an actress in other shows.
• An experiment in unconscious learning in The Prisoner was a cover for rather more unwholesome experimentation. Of course, in The Prisoner they can see your dreams through the lamp over your bed.
• One episode of Round the Twist has Bronson helping Pete to cram for an exam by reading the textbook to him at midnight. Then Bronson begins reading a superhero comic aloud, causing Pete to become convinced he's a superhero. Hilarity Ensues.
• Feral TV (technically a puppet show, but its predecessor, The Ferals, had live actors as well as puppets) features Darren the dog teaching himself to be more assertive by this method. After seeing it work, his "friends" immediately begin sticking in Teach Yourself Karate, Teach Yourself French, and 1001 Uses For A Dead Cane Toad (their boss being a cane toad). Hilarity ensues, but only a little bit since it's a 5-minute program.
• In an episode of Radio Active, George is caught sleeping in class, and explains that he is actually studying his book via osmosis. While it does work, it turns out he was sleeping on the wrong book.
• Referenced in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called "The Voyager Conspiracy." Seven of Nine modified a device called a cortical subunit allowing her to download ship's status reports while she was regenerating. When she mentioned this to Captain Janeway, Tom Paris commented "Learn while you sleep? I tried that once, gave me a headache." The ultimate effect of Seven of Nine's experiment was that the new information wasn't absorbed properly and she became paranoid, convinced that both Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay were plotting against Voyager.
• Randy Disher did this in the ending of the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Visits A Farm" regarding a case file of a crime he reviewed. Justified, as he initially thought it was the result of his sleeping that he solved the cause of the murder of his uncle (Monk, while Disher was asleep, fed the answer through his ear without his knowledge).

Newspaper Comics

• One Pearls Before Swine story arc revolved around one of the crocs unknowingly becoming a master at Jeopardy because he kept falling asleep while watching the show.
• One Sunday Peanuts strip had Linus describing to Lucy how putting a book under his pillow will let the learning enter his head by osmosis. "While I'm asleep, the answers will seep up through the pillow and into my head." The last panel is a shot of his worried face as he says "...I hope!"
  • This is based on an old children's tale, where use of said technique resulted in one kid's head expanding to accommodate the new knowledge. Eventually the head grew so big it filled the kid's room. I can't remember how it ended, though. Probably had something to do with An Aesop about taking the quick path.
• A similar joke was used is a FoxTrot strip when Jason mentioned Peter used the same method. Unfortunately, the day the strip took place, Peter had tests for three different subjects, leaving his neck horribly twisted in the morning.
  • Another time, he had an IQ test. "So that's where all those volumes of the encyclopedia went."
  • This trope also led to a Dream Arc regarding the Odyssey (Peter tried to invoke the trope regarding the Odyssey), and somehow ended up dragging Jason into the dream. The ending of the dream has him discovering that Quincy was playing the role of Penelope, a discovery that was strongly implied to have resulted in him waking up earlier than usual out of disgust.

Video Games

• Apparently, this is one of Tenebrae's seven hidden talents. Neither Emil nor Marta find it useful, however.

Marta: Seriously! Brainwash me into learning something useful next time!

• A research option in Outpost 2. Reported to be ineffective, but it does give a trivial boost to the training time (or minor if playing as Eden).

Web Animation

• The Homestar Runner cartoon "A Jorb Well Done" slightly subverts this. When Coach Z's inability to pronounce the word "job" becomes a major sticking point, the other characters try everything from elementary school to Ludovico's Technique to get him to say "job" without adding a few extra consonants and vowels (and sometimes entire syllables). Finally, Strong Sad suggests a Sleep Learning technique consisting of a tape he made of himself reciting the word "job" over and over from when he was "practicing the dictionary". Coach Z listens to the tape while he sleeps, and the next morning Homestar is pleasantly surprised to find that Coach Z can say "job" with no problem - but now he can't remember how to pronounce "Homestar"! ("You did a great... job, Hamstray. No, wait, I mean Hamster! I mean Strumstar. I mean Stairmaster. Homegrown! Ramrod? Humphel?!")

Western Animation

• Garfield and Friends show 58 has Jon Arbuckle preparing for a pitch to a publisher (his little-seen job is as a cartoonist). The publisher doesn't like Jon's nail-biting habit, so Jon tries using a sleep-learning record to cure himself. Garfield and Odie destroy the record by accident and replace it with cartoon sound effects, a Spanish-language tutoring record, and a "Hits of the 1950s" collection. At the meeting, all Jon can produce is "Hola, Paco, ¿Qué tal?", doo-wop music, and machine-gun noises. As it turns out, the publisher is a Mexican immigrant, named Paco, who likes doo-wop, and the sound effects match Jon's submission very well. Unfortunately, he still hasn't cured his nail-biting habit, and Jon doesn't get published.
• The Simpsons: Homer orders a "weight loss" tape to help curb his overeating, but since they're all out, they send him a "vocabulary builder" tape. He spends much of the episode consuming vast amounts of food while talking about it in very long words.
• Dexter's Laboratory, "The Big Cheese": Dexter tries to cram for a French test at school, but his recording skips, and when he wakes up in the morning all he is able to say is "omelette du fromage". The only question on the test, luckily, is to translate the phrase "cheese omelette". In fact, "omelette du fromage" is the phrase needed for every situation Dex faces for the rest of the cartoon, including solving the Mid-East crisis. His only obstacle? The password needed to enter the lab is "Star Wars", so the lab's voice-activated vault door bars his re-entry.
  • Ironically, the correct way of referring to a cheese omelette in French would probably be omelette au fromage. "Omelette du fromage" would translate to "cheese's omelette"
• Hank and Dean from The Venture Bros. are educated this way in lieu of school. Apparently it works. In fact it also copies their memories to be implanted into spare clones of them for their frequent deaths.
  • Of course theres the whole subtext about how the learning bed's outdated information and the resulting lack of contact with other kids compared to school has much to do with Hank and Dean's weirdness and idiocy. Dr. Venture has at least some awareness of the downsides of this teaching method having been subjected to it himself ("And THAT'S why I didn't lose my virginity until I was 24!"), but he apparently doesn't care.
  • Later on we see that Dr. Venture uses the exact same recordings his father made for him, simply dubbing in "Hank and Dean" over "Rusty" and leaving everything else the same. Given his own dickish nature, the Doc's father, Dr. Jonas Venture Sr. probably didn't put the most care in his lessons even when it was appropriate for the time.
• An Alvin and The Chipmunks special used the trope when Alvin was trying to learn how to act romantic before a Valentine's dance. It's shown working...as Alvin dubs himself "Captain Chipmunk".
• In Futurama, advertisements are inserted into everyone's dreams ...just like this liquid gets into this egg, (injecting a liquid into an egg, which then explodes).
  • "Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation"

Real Life

• When C. J. Cherryh was in college, she once had exams on US history and Machiavelli on the same day. So they day before, she crammed history, then dictated her notes on Machiavelli into a tape recorder and slept while it played in a loop. The next morning, her history exam had an essay: you're Abraham Lincoln, it's a week before Fort Sumter, what do you do? She wrote down a detailed plan of arrests and assassinations, and turned it in before she realized what she'd done. She got an A.
• One British ASW Captain had a habit of going to sleep during maneuvers with a pair of headphones connected to the sonar. At one time he woke up and said, "That's a submarine". And indeed it was. When asked how he knew he said it had a "metallic sound" or something of the kind.
• It's easier to retain knowledge if you read/listen to it just before you go to sleep, due to the shift from normal brain-waves to alpha brain-waves. As an added bonus, you'll be able to comprehend it and not just be a living tape recorder. However, it still takes at least a few days, so cramming the night before a test isn't recommended.
• This is how Worry Dolls work. You tell them your worries before you go to bed and they do the worrying for you.

1. ↑ Well, kinda. If you learn something while awake, then that information can be reinforced while you are asleep.