In our competitive society, some consider it a badge of honor to get only four or five hours of sleep a night, or pull all-nighters in the service of work. Forget about naps.
However, sleep might have more benefits than just making you sharper and more alert during your waking hours. Sleep also brings dreams, which new research has shown shapes creative ideas that come to us like gifts from a muse.
While sleeping, the brain is not idle. It is still working — and scientists have found ways to direct dreams and squeeze more creative juice from them.
Illustration: Constance Chou
Even if you do not remember what happened in a dream, synaptic pathways are changing in the brain, said Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Robert Stickgold, who has been studying dreams for decades.
Associations are made and strengthened while asleep, he said, adding that this leads to those ideas we get and wonder where they came from.
US inventor Thomas Edison, British author Mary Shelley and British musician Paul McCartney reported creative ideas coming from dreams. Spanish artist Salvador Dali wrote of his own dream hacking technique — napping as he held a key over a plate so it would fall and wake him in time to remember his dreams and make artistic use of them.
Dali was on to something. There is a phase called N1, right as you are first falling asleep, when your dreams are most likely to follow from the thoughts you are having as you drift off. A well timed suggestion can steer the course of those dreams.
Building on Dali’s experiment, but using a device that detects the onset of N1, Stickgold and a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed they could induce people to dream about a particular subject, and that doing so helped them become more creative, at least temporarily.
They published their findings last month in Scientific Reports.
Until the past few years, dream research was not respectable science, Stickgold said.
It was nearly impossible to get funding. The primary form of data were people’s reports of their own dreams, which were considered too subjective and idiosyncratic to study in a rigorous way.
However, about 20 years ago, Stickgold had a breakthrough idea following a dream. He had been on a hiking trip that involved climbing on some rocky terrain.
“As I was going to bed, I could literally feel myself back on the rocks,” he said.
He thought this might have something to do with his brain storing what he had learned on the mountain. He asked his students how they might go about studying this phenomenon in the lab, and someone suggested Tetris, a video game that involves rotating falling shapes.
In a study published in 2000, he and colleagues showed that some volunteers who played the game would have visual dreams about the falling shapes — even several subjects who suffered from amnesia.
In his new study, conducted with Adam Haar, Kathleen Esfahany and Thomas Vega from the MIT Media Lab, the team wanted to see how dreams influence what is called divergent creativity — the generation of new ideas, or thinking out of the box.
In the other form, convergent creativity, the mind pieces together diverse clues to solve a problem.
The MIT researchers had developed a device, dubbed a Dormio, which fits over a person’s hand and monitors skin conductivity, muscle tension, temperature and pulse, which can indicate the stages of sleep to show whether the N1 phase had started.
At just the right moment, the device would ask the subjects to think about trees, and then it would wake them up every few minutes and ask them to recount their dreams, which it recorded.
About 70 percent of subjects getting the tree prompt dreamed about trees; some had up to five dreams about trees.
One dreamed of being much bigger than trees and “eating them like finger food.”
Another dreamed of being an “oak king” with wooden arms and legs and leaves for a crown.
Those who experienced more dreams about trees scored higher on creativity tests — a vindication of Dali and his fellow creative dreamers.
The findings are a reminder that the line between productivity and resting is blurry — especially in creative endeavors.
It is possible that in a productivity-obsessed society, people keep skimping on sleep and try to use dream-hacking to stay productive 24/7.
However, ideally these new revelations about dreams and creativity can move people toward more balance, giving sleep and even naps some much needed respect.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the Follow the Science podcast. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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