In the post-midnight hours of June 16th, 1816, after sharing ghost stories with Lord Byron and her husband Percy, Mary Shelley tried hard to fall asleep. As she lulled into the night, a dream visited her - a terrifying vision of a scientist kneeling by the phantasmic body of a creature he had patched up, which was suddenly brought to life. This sparked an idea in her, giving birth to the first science fiction novel in English literature - Frankenstein.
Creativity in its simplest form means thinking beyond the norm. Bringing new ideas into existence, inventing novel solutions, creating something original and unseen - all these fall under the description of creativity. While commonly related to the arts, creativity blooms in all areas requiring ingenuity. It is the ability to take seemingly random, unrelated concepts and connect them in ways that are beyond the hold of concrete thinking. Fluidity and imagination are the ideal breeding ground for creative ideas. And what is the purest, most prototypical instance where we experience this if not in our dreams? Where else do we witness something that is so unmethodically free and bizarre?
Michel Foucault stated that dreams are the starting point of imagination. Much of our existing art was first born in the unconscious from where they spilled onto an instrument, canvas, or screen. Dreams by Akira Kurosawa is a compilation of some of the director’s most dazzling dreams. Songs like ‘You and I’ by Jeff Buckley and ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles were once fleeting dreams in the singers’ unconscious. Anecdotally, there is an undeniable connection between the dream state and creativity. How this connection exists and what its implications suggest have been researched in recent times but it was not unknown to our predecessors. The Surrealists were known for forsaking rational thought and turning to their subconscious to explore and portray the ideas they visualise. They would use automatism or free association, a popular method in Freud’s psychoanalysis, to bring forth the unconscious and exploit the dream state for art inspiration. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the discovery of the structure of benzene, and the placement of the eye on a needle were all inventions brought about by dreams.
Modern research has contributed further to our understanding. Dream recall has been correlated with higher creativity levels, mostly attributed to an escape from stereotypical thinking. When reason and morality are shut down, the brain is allowed to think and imagine more creatively. The practical part of our brain is put to rest allowing our wildest ideas to flow as a free uninhibited stream. We could say that dreaming resembles the brainstorming phase of creativity, where the brain takes information and prepares an idea by playing with associations. Neuroscience has explained how areas of executive control, logical decision-making, and focused attention are suppressed while dreaming with sensory and emotional areas being more activated. The restrictions we impose on our thinking break down and associations between vaguely related concepts become easier to make.
A study using word priming showed that when woken up from REM sleep - majorly associated with dreaming - participants were more likely to pair words that were not strongly related. Usually, people are more inclined to pair the word “wrong” with “right” or “day” with “night”. Why then did participants in this study find it easier to pair words like “wrong” with “house”? This is because post-REM the associative links we form between established concepts seem to weaken. It is almost as if the brain finds newer ways to make connections and “think out of the box” - processes that are pivotal to artists and other creatives.
Whether dreams affect the creativity of all individuals equally was a question taken up by studying dream recall with personality. Those more susceptible to fantasizing and imagination, thus scoring higher on the openness trait of personality, were likelier to recall the vivid imagery in their dreams. Openness is characterised by engaging in novel experiences and taking in new ideas - creativity naturally forms an important facet. Creative people absorb more from their surroundings as they are more perceptive of stimuli, including their dreams. Virtuoso musicians have also been found to dream of original music more than twice compared to non-musicians. Thus we cannot say with certainty that a unidirectional association exists between dreams and creativity.
In more groundbreaking research, the MIT Lab found that the hypnagogic NREM1 sleep phase (the "twilight" stage between wakefulness and sleep) can boost creativity. They used targeted dream incubation (TDI) which involved a recorded voice guiding participants to dream about specific themes, like a “tree.” Participants who dreamed about “tree” performed 43% better than unprompted individuals on creativity tasks on the same topic, such as story-writing, often incorporating dream content into their work. Other creative tasks involved coming up with innovative alternate uses for “tree”, with some participants mentioning “backscratcher” or “toothpick for giants”!
This is the first time such a finding has emerged from an experiment on dreams - empirically implicating them as pivots of creativity. However, this is hardly a novel discovery. Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison used similar techniques to harness ideas from this sleep stage. Dali would sleep with a heavy object in his hand so that when he would nod off, the object would fall and he would be awoken. He would then use these dream-inspired images in his art. MIT used a sleep onset tracker with auditory feedback prompting individuals to dream of a particular topic to generate the same path to creativity. A user-friendly version of it is available here. So maybe the next time you’re stuck on a creative project, try using DIY techniques like peering into your own dreams!
Freud regarded dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, the same unconscious brimming with one’s deepest desires, urges, and beliefs. Therefore it is not surprising that dreams can play such a productive role in creative expression. We may not have completely deciphered the meaning of our dreams, whether their symbols are universal or whether they have any meaning at all. Debates like these will always exist. Yet the imaginative nature of our dreams paves the way for a spring of creation and it is exciting what future research on this subject may reveal.
Arshi Khan
