For centuries, creativity was seen as beyond man, a gift from the gods. If dreams played a role, they were considered divine. messages. In the nineteenth century, Goethe and Schiller connected creation with the unconscious. Though still mysterious, the process was now viewed as internally arising rather than externally imposed. Freud’s emphasis on dreaming as “the royal road to the unconscious” brought it into this same realm.
Twentieth -century psychologists divide problem solving into four stages: “preparation,” “frustration,” “inspiration,” and “verification.” Inspiration cannot be accessed at will, and creativity is most essential here. This is where dreams typically play their role. Any break from concentrated problem solving may allow a misleading assumption to dissipate. But the sleeping mind abandons conventional logic most completely to pursue novel approaches.
At this point, Barrett (2001, p. 18his point, Barrett (2001, p. 18) asks the key question: how does this work?
How does the Committee do this? Neurology suggests that dreaming is simply the mind thinking in a different biochemical mode. Throughout this emotional, visual, hallucinatory state, we. continue to worry about personal, practical, or artistic problems-and occasionally we solve them. Freud wrote of a “dream censor” keeping unacceptable sex and aggression at bay. But as a gatekeeper for novel solutions to problems, the Committee is a more liberal than any daytime censor.
Barrett (2001, p. 189) concludes with this statement about the distinctive role that dreams can play in solving problems: “Dreaming is, above all, a time when the unheard parts of ourselves are allowed to speak—we would do well to listen.” While Barrett is speaking from a 21st Century perspective and has moved well beyond the psychoanalytic perspectives of the early 20th Century, she still acknowledges the liberating role played by dreams and echoes Carl Jung’s exhortation that we should listen to what the dreams are telling us.
Matthew Walter (1027, p. 219) adds to what Barrett has offered, building many of his conclusions on research conducted about REM and non-REM sleep:
Deep NREM sleep strengthens individua). memories, as we now know. But it is REM sleep that offers the masterful and complementary benefit of fusing arid blending those element.al ingredients together, in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities- “the gist” We awake with a revised Mind Wide Web that is capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. In this way, REM-sleep dreaming is informational alchemy. From this dreaming process, which I would describe as ideasthesia, have come some of the most revolutionary leaps forward in human progress.
Walker (2017, p. 226) goes on to draw analogy to peering out of both ends of a telescope:
This widening of our memory aperture is akin to peering through a telescope from the opposing end. When we are awake we are looking i through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.
