Does Dreaming Make Me More Creative?

Dreaming is the brain’s go-to sandbox for playing around with unusual ideas and trying out solutions that our logic-driven conscious brain would dismiss out of hand.

Not every problem has a straightforward solution. Often, predicaments or dilemmas need creative, lateral thought and leaps of logic—and your methodical frontal lobe brain regions aren’t always suited to these tasks. When you dream, however, your emotional centers play by different rules. Like a police detective’s investigation board, experiences, places, and faces can be “pinned up,” then rearranged and strung together in many different ways to reveal previously unnoticed connections and hidden solutions.

After a day or evening spent trying to master something new—be it a video game, a musical instrument, or taking up a new sport—you’ll likely notice that these daytime efforts leak into your nocturnal mental wanderings. This ability is crucial to learning and developing new skills, and to weave these new experiences into your existing mental meshwork, effectively lining up the cellular cables so that everything runs smoothly. This may be another reason babies do so much REM sleeping—their new world is full of new experiences, so their dreaming brains have to work overtime to assimilate them.

When your brain is firing in its most relaxed state, creative ideas and out-of-the-box thinking are more common—and these abilities are supercharged during REM sleep. Without a doubt, dreams are a hotbed of creativity out of which musical motifs and artistic ideas can bubble. Paul McCartney’s Yesterday and Let It Be are just two of the countless examples of songs birthed in a dreamscape. Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí used to eat sea urchins in dark chocolate sauce before bed, hoping that it would make his dreams more bizarre, but science has yet to back up his logic.

You’ll be more likely to remember your creative inspirations if you wake from REM sleep. And there’s plenty of evidence of a strong link between better mental abilities and getting good REM sleep, especially in childhood.

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the dreaming brain

Your dreams are wacky and weird because the sensible and logical prefrontal cortex is completely switched off, allowing your brain to creatively freestyle.