Channeling Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí, researchers show that shaping dream imagery could spark creative ideas to target a specific problem
The structure of benzene, Google and Frankenstein: What do these icons of science, technology and literature all share? They are among the numerous discoveries and inventions that are said to have been inspired through the act of dreaming.
What’s more, the scientists found they could even exercise some measure of control over the dreaming process. They did so by directing people’s dreams toward a specific topic. The more people dreamed about that theme, the more creative they were on tasks related to it.
In 2021 a team of researchers at the Paris Brain Institute reported some of the first solid evidence that Dalí and Edison were onto something. They had people take short naps after exposing them to math problems for which there was a hidden shortcut.
Of the nappers who received the tree prompt, all but one reported dreaming of trees or parts of trees, compared with just a single person among the nappers who received the more general instruction. One tree-cued dreamer described “trees splitting into infinite pieces” and being in the desert with “a shaman sitting under the tree with me.”
In addition, the more references to trees a person reported, the higher that person’s creativity score was. “The more you dream about a tree, the better your performance is later,” says Kathleen Esfahany, an M.I.T. undergraduate who co-led the study with Haar Horowitz. People seemed to use their dreams to get ideas for those tasks, Esfahany adds.
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