It is commonly noted that many people take their work home with them -- if not in their briefcases, then in their brains. Now a new survey suggests that a majority of small-business professionals not only take their work home, but they also take it to bed.

In the survey of 300 small-business owners and managers, sponsored by Staples, the office supply people, 51 percent of respondents said they dream about work, and nearly 70 percent of those "sleepworkers" reported they get ideas in their sleep that they use at work.

No surprise there, said Robert Vertes, professor of neuroscience at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University.

"People are wrapped up in their work. They spend a good deal of the day working, there's social interactions at work, and there's the nature of the work itself," he said. "If they were at the beach or doing something else recreational, I would expect that to be a common component in their dreams."

Opinions vary, however, as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Mick Quinn, who started and sold a couple of businesses before establishing the Choice for Enlightened Living Foundation in Wyckoff, N.J., describes such sleep activity as a beneficial form of "lucid dreaming," which is characterized by the awareness that one is dreaming.

"Dreams (alpha brainwaves) can allow us to learn about our work while we sleep, especially if we can become lucid. That is, realize that we are actually dreaming," Mr. Quinn wrote in an e-mail.

"Then if we wish, we can off and question Jack Welch about our business ideas!"

Not really.

"It really isn't Jack Welch. He could be playing golf in Australia while you're sleeping," Mr. Quinn acknowledged. But the point, he said, is that in the dream state, "We have access to a virtually unlimited amount of information which we don't have access to" while awake.

Mr. Vertes expressed a general skepticism about ideas received in dreams.

"I tend to think the best solutions are advanced in the working state," he said.

Donna Flagg, president of the Krysalis Group, a New-York based business and management consulting firm, splits the difference between conscious and unconscious problem-solving. Ms. Flagg said she consistently gets some of her best ideas, if not while sleeping, then in the "twilight time" just before conking out.

Ms. Flagg said she discovered the pattern some five years ago, when she was in charge of training programs at Goldman Sachs. Actually, her co-workers noticed before she did, the frequency with which she would come in to work in the morning and say, "I had the best idea last night as I was falling asleep!"

Now, when she and her partner, Patty Lee-Renert, are meeting with clients to discuss their needs, Ms. Lee-Renert will say to them, indicating Ms. Flagg, "She just needs to basically fall asleep."

"Ninety percent of the time, I wake up with what we need to do," Ms. Flagg said.

While Ms. Flagg may rely upon her semiconscious idea generator, Debbie Mandel, a Lawrence, N.Y.-based author and speaker who specializes in stress management issues, said dreaming of work was a manifestation of stress, pure and simple.

"We just can't shut it off because we work late hours and are overstimulated," she said.

The results of a different survey, conducted by the British bank NatWest in 2003, tend to support Ms. Mandel's view. In that survey, 72 percent of 1,000 respondents said they had work-related dreams, but for nearly half, the experience was not benign -- 48 percent of them reported that such dreams caused them to wake up in a cold sweat.

Mr. Quinn said such terrors were "most likely a reflection of what Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud called 'the shadow' -- the repressed or denied aspects of ourselves."

Sounds like something that might take years of therapy to deal with, but Mr. Quinn offered a simpler solution. Because the most active time for dreaming is from 5:30 a.m. onward, he said, "It's better to get up at 6 a.m. and just not hang out there."