A deep dive into the science of sleep and how to harness dream creativity to solve real world problems.
Person sleeping with clouds and creative objects in the background. Image credit: Matty Hodgkins
As someone who has their best ideas when falling asleep, I’ve always been interested in the power of sleep for creative problem-solving. Recently, I’ve been exploring the different ways in which we can harness the power of sleep for creative work.
My investigation has been inspired by Professor Matthew Walker’s fascinating book Why we Sleep, a great read for anyone interested in understanding more about the role of sleep more generally. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to dream creativity, in which he describes a range of real-world examples and experiments which demonstrate the link between sleep and creative problem-solving.
One of the best-known historical examples is the story of how Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev came to imagine the order of elements in the periodic table in 1869. For many years, Mendeleev had been trying to work out the organisational logic to all the known elements. He created a card deck, each with a different element, which he would continually shuffle and re-arrange to try and make sense of the structure. After many waking attempts trying to solve the problem, one night in 1869, he dreamed the solution.
“I saw in a dream a table, where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary” — Dmitri Mendeleev.
Sleep and the sweet spot for creativity
Much of the scientific research to date has focussed on REM sleep, a stage in the sleep cycle where the hierarchy of logical associative connections present during waking hours is gone. During REM sleep, the brain makes connections between distantly related memories or concepts, seeking out distance and non-obvious links between sets of information (Cai et al., 2009).
It’s well known in the field of innovation and creativity that combining unrelated concepts to look for new connections is one of the key paths to creative insight. And, when you are looking for more transformational creativity, increasing the inspirational distance between the two concepts can help to generate more unexpected and original ideas (Gonçalves et al., 2013). So, it appears the REM dream state is particularly good at replicating this effect.
Another point in the sleep cycle that has been demonstrated to be a sweet spot for creativity is sleep onset — also known as N1 or hypnagogia (Lacaux et al., 2021). During this transitional state, we drift between wakefulness and sleep, with the brain starting to make connections between different concepts and memories. Thomas Edison was known to take advantage of sleep onset to help him solve tricky problems. He would intentionally sit down for a nap, holding a metal ball in his hand. On falling asleep, the ball would drop onto the floor wake him up, at which point he would often have a new solution in mind.
When do you have your best ideas?
Within the scientific literature around dream creativity, it’s clear that sleep can help to generate new ideas and help with creative problem solving — but how significant is this? How important is sleep overall when thinking about how creative we are as individuals? Is it simply just one of many points in our day when we are creative?
I set up a short consumer research study using the Voxpopme platform to find out more about when people are most creative in their day-to-day lives, asking 100 consumers* from the US and UK “When do you have your best ideas?”
On analysing the data, what was most striking was the high proportion of people (59%) who claimed that they are most creative after sleep, either when waking in the middle of the night (20%) or first thing in the morning (39%). Just before falling asleep was the next most commonly mentioned (16%), typically in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogia). So, sleep-related categories accounted for 75% of all answers.
This is a powerful finding, especially when you consider that most creative sessions and workshops are run during working hours, and in an environment which is as far removed as you could be from sleep.
*Sample covered broad range of age, gender, SEG, and geographic region within each country.
How to harness the creative power of sleep
Researchers at MIT have been looking into the creative potential of the hypnagogic stage, finding that when people receive auditory prompts to dream about a particular theme as they fall asleep, they perform strongly on creative tasks related to this theme when they awake from a short nap — similar to Thomas Edison (Horowitz et al., 2023).
This approach of targeted dream incubation is highly focussed, making it suitable for tackling specific creative problems, and there is a simple online tool, Dormio, which replicates the study protocol using a simple timer rather than physiological tracking. It’s an easy exercise to set up yourself, for example the day before a creative workshop, or whenever you have a difficult creative problem that you’re struggling to solve.
Another practical tip is to capture creative questions and thoughts just before bedtime — whichever way works for you, pen and paper, digital notes or audio recording — then repeat again upon waking, giving yourself 5–10 min to pause and reflect before getting on with your day. This could be set as a workshop task for participants too, for example between Day 1 and 2 of a workshop to encourage incubation time.
It’s also worth bearing in mind the importance of getting enough sleep. Sleep deprivation is well known to have a negative impact on overall cognitive performance, and research has shown that the more creative, divergent and innovative aspects of cognition do appear to be degraded by lack of sleep (Killgore, 2010).
These findings certainly challenge conventional innovation methods structured around creative sessions and workshops which happen during office hours. It suggests that changing the context (environment and time of day) in which creative exercises occur, and trying specific interventions like targeted dream incubation, can have a big impact on the overall creative output for a project.
So, the next time you are working on a creative challenge, think about how you might leverage the agenda, activities or context to make sure the team have an opportunity to sleep on it!
References
Cai, D.J., Mednick, S.A., Harrison, E.M., Kanady, J.C., & Mednick, S.C. (2009) REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. PNAS 106 (25) 10130–10134
Gonçalves, M., Cardoso, C., & Badke-Schaub, P. (2013) Inspiration peak: exploring the semantic distance between design problem and textual inspirational stimuli, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 1:4, 215–232.
Horowitz, A.H., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T.V., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2023) Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Sci Rep 13, 7319.
Killgore, W.D.S. (2010) Effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. Progress in Brain Research 185 (105–129).
Lacaux, C., Andrillon, T., Bastoul, C., Idir, Y., Fonteix-Galet, A., Arnulf I., & Oudiette, D. (2021) Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot. Sci. Adv. 7 (50).
Creativity and why we should sleep on it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
