How keeping a dream diary could boost your creativity

By Alex Fradera For me, dreams and creativity have always been wound tightly together. As a teenager leafing through my dad’s Heavy Metal comic strip anthologies, it was Little Nemo in Slumberland (about a character who has fantastic dreams) that stunned me the most. When I became a psychology researcher, I was fascinated with altered states and formed a short-lived dream research group with my fellow PhD students – somnambulant life seemed so mysterious, and the then-received wisdom that dreams were just brain static was becoming untenable. Today, outside of my science hours, I perform improvisational theatre, most intensively with The Dreaming, a surrealistic troupe mimicking dream-logic. And in recent years, I’ve made my sporadic dream-logging into a habit (tip: keep a voice recorder by your bed and capture everything you can without worrying about sense or structure). Could this habit make me more creative? According to new research published in the Journal of Creative Behavior, it could. Together with my own sense that dreams feed creativity, there are a number of anecdotes that press the same message: Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table, Elias Howe’s conception of the lock-stitch sewing machine, Descarte’s road to the scientific method and James Cameron’s ideas for The Terminator, were all apparently inspired by dreams. What’s more, evidence suggests that greater dream recall is correlated with measures of creativity. This could simply be becau...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Sleep and dreaming Source Type: blogs