Do Lucid Dreams Promote Creativity?

Do Lucid Dreams Promote Creativity?

Patrick McNamara Ph.D.

Dream recall frequency, narrative complexity, and certain dream content indicators have all been correlated with various creativity measures in research. People who learn to "incubate" a problem in their dreams are often able to reliably dream up a solution—one that may not always solve the problem immediately, but that they later judge to have been significantly helpful in devising a "real" solution. Lucid dreaming, in particular, has been positively linked both with creativity and with problem-solving successes. But while all of these clues are suggestive and interesting, it would be beneficial to have some controlled studies on dream creativity.

A recent report by Lacaux et al. [1] comes close to that. The researchers took a novel approach to the study of dreams and creativity. They looked at people who spend a lot of time in a dreaming state and who frequently experience lucid dreams—namely, people with narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy is essentially a disorder of disinhibited REM sleep. The waking life of these individuals is frequently interrupted by full-blown, unpredictable episodes of REM. Patients report feelings of dreaminess and hallucinatory states when REM interrupts their conscious life. If cataplexy (the body paralysis that accompanies REM sleep) occurs alongside dreaminess and hallucinations, the individual may suddenly lose motor control and drop, paralyzed but conscious.

Interestingly, people with narcolepsy report a large amount of lucid dreams...

[Laird]

Moved there...