The Dream Solution : Can’t find the answer to a nagging problem? Need a little creative inspiration? Try hitting the sack.

Forget the Internet. The real information superhighway may be as close as your pillow. Call it the inner net.

Think we’re dreaming?

You’re right.

Meet dream believer Floyd Ragsdale. He’s an engineer at the DuPont Co. plant in Richmond, Va., which produces the world’s Kevlar polymer--found in everything from military helmets and bulletproof vests to brakes. A few years ago a dryer filter went on the fritz, costing the chemical giant $700 per minute in wasted plastic. Exasperated colleagues thought there was nothing left to do but replace the half-million-dollar unit.

Then, after one particular 16-hour day struggling with the problem, the breakthrough to a solution came to Ragsdale in a dream. He found himself a part of the machine.

“There was water spraying everywhere and I started dreaming about springs and hoses,” he recalls. “Then the idea hit me. Man, I woke up and I jotted down: Hoses. Springs . I knew exactly what I needed to do to resolve the problem.”

Although his theory--that the extreme heat used to make the Kevlar polymer was causing the lining of the two-ply hoses to collapse--was greeted with skeptical laughter, Ragsdale says they were “desperate and willing to try anything.” Springs were inserted into the hoses and “the filter ran like a clock.”

Just another example of what Tarzana psychologist Arthur Bernard calls our “sleeping genius.”

Bernard uses dreams as a tool in his marriage and family counseling. Dreams, he says, can come into play “like a jet stream, a great river of information when you commit yourself to a project and you work real hard to resolve it or solve it, and you can’t get an answer.

“Edgar Cayce called it the ‘super-conscious mind.’ It connects us all and it has access to any source of facts that you need for yourself, whether it’s physical or emotional. Some people can tap into it.”

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Dr. Harvey B. Weintraub, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at USC Medical School, often uses dreams in his West Los Angeles practice to help those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

“When they have these dreams of torture, for example, at one point they are able to understand they’re not just a victim, they’re a survivor,” Weintraub says. “It’s not their fault that they’re in this position. It was done by bad men doing bad things. Victims frequently feel they must have done something to deserve it.

“The subconscious can do an end run around the resistance and it comes out in a dream. ‘Aha! This is what you’ve been hiding from yourself.’

“The unconscious mind never stops working,” says Weintraub, who also is on the faculty of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, where he teaches a course on dreams. “While asleep, the unconscious frequently works at solving problems in creative ways that may not be always available to us while we’re awake.”

The ancient Greeks also believed dreams had medicinal power, Bernard says.

“The only way to be healed in ancient Greece if regular doctors couldn’t help you was through alternative medicine. Alternative medicine in those days was dream healing. The Greeks built a retreat called Epidaurus, where you would go to these temples and stay for a couple of months. They were able to tap into the healing power of the mind by inspiring people through poetry, song and prayer. They would get people’s mind into such a place that they would transcend the conscious level. The healing would take place at the soul level.”

Healing is believing, says Sandra Weintraub, a management consultant from Newton, Mass.; she is not related to the psychiatrist but has attended one of Bernard’s workshops.

“My first reaction was that it was a lot of nonsense,” she says. “But I had been getting pains of arthritis in my fingers. One of the things [Bernard] teaches us is asking your subconscious to tell you the answer. After taking the workshop I had this dream that I was visiting someone in their home and they brought me out to their back porch. There were several bags. A woman reached down and pulled out a cabbage.

“That day I went shopping and made cabbage soup.” The aching disappeared and today Sandra Weintraub says she has “to remind myself that I once did have pain.”

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But it’s creativity and problem-solving that most excite Bernard, whose clients have included Disney Studios, Polaroid and the American Creativity Assn.

One of the more startling case studies is Dan Gold, a former executive of Price Pfister, the San Fernando Valley-based maker of plumbing fixtures.

Gold said that as an ace product developer in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, his best designs and engineering solutions came in dreams.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night and say, ‘That’s the answer. That’s how you do it.’ ”

But one sounds like something out of the “Twilight Zone.”

Last year, Gold, now a private inventor, had run smack into a roadblock on a promising new gizmo. (He declined to be specific because the patent hadn’t been issued.) Time and again he would try this motor and that on the prototype, only to discover that it was too noisy or too big or both.

Then it happened.

“I had a dream. I was out in the wheat fields some place. I ran into this guy. We were chitchatting about God-knows-what. His final words were ‘What you’re looking for is in Kansas.’

“I woke up and wrote it down. What did it mean? I didn’t think a hell of a lot. But then I got to wondering if it had anything to do with motors because that was the only thing I was looking for. I had never even been to Kansas. But I called a friend in Kansas we do business with and said, ‘Look in your business-to-business phone book under “motors.” ’

“He called me back and said there was one listing. I called them up and they were as nice as can be. They sent out a catalogue. I ordered a couple of samples and one was exactly what I was looking for! Right size. Right price. American-made.

“A lot of these big companies won’t sell to the little guys,” Gold said. “I was talking to one of their salesmen, and he wanted to know how I found out about them. They supply the auto makers and don’t do any advertising. When I told him he just said, ‘Wow!’ ”

Bernard, who wants to use his “dream technology” to help the business world realize what he calls a huge resource of information, takes Gold’s experience in stride.

“Everybody has a gift. You have to discover what your gift is,” the psychologist says. “You have to give your gift to the world, whether it’s being a neurosurgeon, a gardener, an actor, a master bricklayer. If you know what your gift is, you’ll be a happier person. A lot of people have been introduced to their gift through their dreams.”

In the final analysis, it’s not so much the message but what one does with it.

“Dreams can change your thinking and actions, but the conscious mind has to put it into action,” Bernard explains. “How are you going to act on what you now know? We can’t evade some inner mechanism, something in us that wants us to evolve into the highest form we can be.”