The Role Dreams Play in Human Creativity

Dreams have often preceded amazing inventions, discoveries, and innovations because the mind is at its most creative when people are fast asleep.

Did you know that your mind is busily analyzing situations, solving problems, and arriving at conclusions while you’re sound asleep? Yes, it’s true. While you’re sleeping, your mind, unlike your body, is not snoozing away but hard at work, especially during the periods when you dream.

The Link between Dreaming and Creative Insights

Research has shown that people often experience “Aha” moments while dreaming because they see issues, problems, and questions more clearly. They’re also more apt to think outside the constraints of the proverbial box, since associations are less restricted, more intuitive, and less lateral when people are sleeping than when they’re awake.

Lateral Thinking versus Vertical Thinking

According to John Dacey and Kathleen Lennon, coauthors of Understanding Creativity: The Interplay of Biological, Psychological, and Social Factors, Edward deBono, in his highly regarded book Lateral Thinking, maintains there is

a distinction between vertical thinking (which means mental operations that move in a straight line back and forth between lower and higher level concepts) and lateral thinking (which means looking for alternative ways of defining and interpreting a problem). (p. 177)

Simply put, while vertical thinking is methodical and orderly (linear), lateral thinking is random and unconventional (circuitous), so lateral thinking is considered the more creative of the two mental processes, and you think laterally when you dream.

Creative Breakthroughs Often Occur after Dreaming

Dreaming has been responsible for innovations by individuals who dreamed about a problem and then achieved breakthroughs after waking. Human dreams, in fact, have resulted in two Nobel prizes, the invention of several major drugs, numerous scientific discoveries, important political events, and innumerable novels, films, and works of art.

Harvard Neuroscientist Robert Stickgold presents these two examples:

• The classic symbol of science, the periodic table of the elements, reportedly occurred to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev during a dream.
• In 1844, American inventor Elias Howe was trying to design his first sewing machine, but he couldn't work out how to make it hold the needle. One night he dreamed of being attacked by cannibals with spears. And as he woke up in terror, the last thing he saw was that all of their spears had the hole at the pointed tip of the spear, and he realized that's where you put the hole in a sewing machine needle.

The Mind Knows Which Dreams to Remember

Interestingly, our minds apparently not only know what to concentrate upon while we’re asleep, but also which dreams are important enough for us to remember.

According to Andy Coghlan, in an article published by New Scientist, Luigi De Gennaro and a team of scientists at the University of Rome conducted a study in which they monitored the brain activity of subjects as they slept; and based upon theta-wave patterns in the frontal and prefrontal cortex areas, along with alpha-wave patterns in the right temporal lobes, the team concluded that

. . . even when we are asleep, the same parts of our brains are on the alert for things to remember. These are often events that are emotionally charged and that the brain deems important, whether we are awake or not (para. 5).

In summary, although research into the relationship between creativity and dreaming is ongoing, scientific studies have demonstrated that the mind is still at work while the body is deep in slumber, and it’s certainly feasible that at least a portion of the mind’s work is devoted to creativity.

Sources:

Coghlan, A. Why Do We Remember Some Dreams but Not Others? New Scientist Life

Dacey, J. & Lennon, K. Understanding Creativity: The Interplay of Biological, Psychological, and Social Factors. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Stickgold, R. & NOVA What Are Dreams?

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