There's a more obvious interpretation of why puzzle-solving improves with REM sleep, and why the mania of those who don't have REM sleep can't seem to shift easily into their own personalised, independent ways of thinking. During the day we are constrained mentally and physically by the orthodoxy of the social reality ( I wrote about this 'Landscape' of activity in my book, Essential Personalities, and why ....). During REM sleep, only about 80% of which, incidentally, can be associated with dreaming, the body is cut-off from this orthodoxy and starts to re-establish independent thought. It's not that we are more clever after REM sleep, it's that we are less inhibited.
There's a good clue that REM sleep embodies rehearsals of waking activity: the body becomes rigid, while remaining open to sense data. This rigidity would be required to prevent the REM sleeping person from acting out his waking activities as his brain re-capitulates them, and at the same time remaining alert to problems in the environment.
I'm not at all sure that sleep researchers are really moving in the right direction when they concentrate on cognitive features at the expense of personality. Sleep-deprivation causes more personality disorders than just about anything else. It is more clearly connected to the juncture of our overal personality with the social world in which we are embedded.
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