Does Dreaming Affect Creativity?

I while back I made a post talking about the relationship I have found between how many hours of sleep I get and the quality of my creative output. I try to monitor myself constantly to see if I can find patterns to how I work. When am I at my best? When do my best ideas come? If I can recognize the factors that help boost my brain then maybe I can improve myself.

One of the things that I have been paying attention as I search for ways to be more creative is my dreams. Every once in a while I will wake up with answers to questions that I couldn’t answer the day before. Sometimes I will see things in my dreams that I can use when I wake up. Am I dreaming these things? It is safe to say that our brains are doing much more than resting when we sleep, but how can we capitalize on it?

I have never used drugs, but I can relate to artists who think that mind altering substances increase their creativity. Creativity could be defined as the ability to uncover the seemingly hidden solutions to situations. A creative person has the ability to see things that other’s would miss, no matter how long they look at the facts. It makes sense that someone who is extremely creative must have some “mind altering” abilities that other people don’t possess. How do they do it? Another word that creative people often get labeled as is “dreamer.” Maybe there is something to that stereotype.

Sleep allows our minds to do things that we can’t do when we are awake. In dreams we are not constrained by the rules of reality. Anything is possible. That is exactly the state that a person’s mind needs to be in if they are going to create something that doesn’t yet exist! It is a shame that so many of us dismiss our dreams as bizarre annoyances that prevent us from enjoying a good night’s sleep.

So how do we harness the power of our dreams? How can we optimize our sleep to maximize our creativity? That’s a tough question, but I have some ideas that I will share in my next post. Right now it’s bed time and I feel like dreaming.