The majority of studies on sleep creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning, and there are several hypotheses about the creative function of dreams. On the other hand, a few recent studies have supported a theory of creative insomnia, in which creativity is significantly correlated with sleep disturbance.

Anecdotal accounts of sleep and creativity

Jack Nicklaus Jack William Nicklaus (born January 21, 1940), nicknamed The Golden Bear, is a retired American professional golfer and golf course designer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest golfers of all time. He won 117 professional tou ...

had a dream that allowed him to correct his golf swing. * German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé stated that the idea for the ring structure of

benzene Benzene is an organic chemical compound with the molecular formula C6H6. The benzene molecule is composed of six carbon atoms joined in a planar ring with one hydrogen atom attached to each. Because it contains only carbon and hydrogen atoms ...

came to him in a day-dream, in which he saw snakes biting their own tails. *

Jasper Johns Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other US-related top ...

was inspired to paint his first flag painting as a result of a dream. *

Aphex Twin Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), best known as Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic styles such as techno, ambient, and jungle. Journalists from publicati ...

wrote much of the music on his album '' Selected Ambient Works Volume II'' by going to sleep in the studio, and then recreating the sounds he heard in dreams as soon as he woke up. *

Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as '' Treasure Island'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll ...

came up with the plot of ''

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'' is a 1886 Gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old ...

'' during a dream. *

Paul McCartney Sir James Paul McCartney (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with the Beatles, for whom he played bass guitar and shared primary songwriting and lead vocal duties with John Lennon. One ...

discovered the tune for the song " Yesterday" in a dream and was inspired to write " Yellow Submarine" during

hypnagogia Hypnagogia is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep: the ''hypnagogic'' state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. Its opposite state is described as the transitional state from sleep into wakefulness. Mental ...

. *

Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel '' Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also ...

's ''

Frankenstein ''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ...

'' was inspired by a dream at

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...

's villa. * British poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lak ...

wrote "

Kubla Khan ''Kubla Khan'' () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to ''Kubla Khan'', the poe ...

" after finding inspiration from an opium induced dream. *

Otto Loewi Otto Loewi (; 3 June 1873 – 25 December 1961) was a German-born pharmacologist and psychobiologist who discovered the role of acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter. For his discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or M ...

, a German physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. He discovered in a dream how to prove his theory. *

Giuseppe Tartini Giuseppe Tartini (8 April 1692 – 26 February 1770) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era born in the Republic of Venice. Tartini was a prolific composer, composing over a hundred of pieces for the violin with the majority of ...

, a composer, gained inspiration for his Devil's Trill Sonata in a dream where the Devil appeared to him and played the melody on Tartini's violin. * An alternative interpretation of

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters ''The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'' or ''The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters'' ( es, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) is an aquatint by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Created between 1797 and 1799 for the , it ...

considers

Francisco Goya Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish Romanticism, romantic painter and Printmaking, printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His p ...

's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares as made possible by the unconscious.

Sleep and creativity studies

REM sleep as a state of increased cognitive flexibility

In a study on

cognitive flexibility Cognitive flexibility is an intrinsic property of a cognitive system often associated with the mental ability to adjust its activity and content, switch between different task rules and corresponding behavioral responses, maintain multiple con ...

across the sleep-wake cycle, researchers discovered that when woken from

REM sleep Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep or REMS) is a unique phase of sleep in mammals and birds, characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes, accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body, and the propensity of the sleeper to dream ...

, participants had a 32% advantage on an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into ''nag a ram'', also the word ...

task (when compared with the number of correct responses after NREM awakenings). This was consistent with the hypothesis that due to the lack of aminergic dominance in REM sleep, this particular sleep state is highly conducive to fluid reasoning and flexible thought. Participant performance after awakening from REM sleep was not better than participants who stayed awake, which indicates that in REM sleep, there is an alternative (but just as effective) mode of problem solving that differs from the mechanism available while awake.

Sleep facilitates insight

Participants in a study were asked to translate a string of digits using two simple rules that allowed the string to be reduced to a single digit (number reduction task). Out of three groups of participants (those who slept, those who stayed awake during the day, and those who stayed awake during the night), participants who got eight hours of sleep were two times as likely during retesting to gain insight into a hidden rule built into the task. In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep. It was found that her students were able to come up with rational solutions to their problems in their dreams. In this study published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), 50% of the students that participated reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, while 25% came up with solutions in their dreams.

Lack of sleep impairs creativity

Some participants in a study went 32 hours without sleep while the control participants slept normally. When tested on flexibility and originality on figural and verbal tests, the sleep-deprived participants had severe and persistent impairments in their performance. A study tested 30 undergraduate students from seven different academic institutions, half majoring in art and half majoring in social sciences. Among all the participants, the higher the level of visual creativity, the lower the quality of their sleep was. The researchers also found that the higher the participants' level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up.

Sleep and Humor

Under hypnotic-induced sleep, participants were much more likely to produce paraphrases of jokes that they had heard before and to spontaneously create new jokes (when compared with their performance while awake).

Integration of relational memory

Recent studies have also shown that sleep not only helps consolidate memory, but also integrates relational memories. In one study, the participants were tested to see if sleep helped in this aspect (Ellenbogen et al., 2007, as cited in Walker, 2009). The subjects of the experiment were taught five "premise pairs", A>B, B>C, C>D, and D>E. They were not aware of the overall hierarchy, where A>B>C>D>E. The subjects were split into 3 separate groups. The first group was tested 20 minutes after learning the pairs, the second was tested 12 hours later without sleep, and the third was tested 12 hours later with sleep in between. The groups were tested in both first degree pairs (A>B, C>D, etc.) and 2nd degree pairs (A>C, B>D, or C>E). The results were that with the first degree pairs, the first group only performed at around chance levels, and the second and third groups had significantly better performances. With the 2nd degree pairs, the first group still performed at around chance levels, and the second group performed at about the same level as in the 1st degree pair test. However, the third group performed even better than before, gaining a 25% advantage over the group without sleep. The results of this study showed that sleep is a significant factor in integrating memories, or gaining the bigger picture.

Creative insomnia

''Creative insomnia'' refers to the idea that

insomnia Insomnia, also known as sleeplessness, is a sleep disorder in which people have trouble sleeping. They may have difficulty falling asleep, or staying asleep as long as desired. Insomnia is typically followed by daytime sleepiness, low energy, ...

can actually spark creativity.

Anecdotal accounts of creative insomnia

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel '' In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous ...

wrote most of his ''À la recherche du temps perdu'' (In Search of Lost Time) while staying awake in the night due to a chronic illness. In ''Sodome et Gomorrhe'', he suggests that "Un peu d'insomnie n'est pas inutile pour apprécier le sommeil, projeter quelque lumière dans cette nuit. little insomnia is useful for appreciating sleep, for projecting some light into this night. * Film-maker Alan Berliner made a documentary on his lifelong insomnia and its complex role in his creative process. * "Insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge." –

Colette Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her ...

* "It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A 'bad night' is not always a bad thing." –

Brian W. Aldiss Brian Wilson Aldiss (; 18 August 1925 – 19 August 2017) was an English writer, artist, and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for o ...

* ''Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems'' (edited by Lisa Russ Spaar) is a collection of over eighty poems by famous poets and writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Bronté and Robert Frost, all inspired by sleepless nights. Fifteen of the poems actually have "insomnia" in the title. * "Si les insomnies d'un musicien lui font créer de belles oeuvres, ce sont de belles insomnies. f the insomnia of a musician allows him to create beautiful pieces, it is a beautiful insomnia. –

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, simply known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (, , ; 29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of s ...

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...

believed that insomnia was a positive influence on his work. He once remarked that "sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals."

Studies that support creative insomnia

Although no studies have actually shown a causal relationship yet, various studies have suggested that the positive relationship between sleep and creativity is more complicated and less clear-cut than previously thought. * One study with children (ages 10–12) in New Zealand demonstrated a correlation between insomnia and creative thought. This study looked at the incidence of sleep disturbances in thirty ''highly creative children'' when compared with thirty ''control children''. The hypothesis was that there would be a higher incidence of sleep disturbance in the highly creative children than in the control children. Results showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups, with the creative children reporting more sleep disturbance, therefore suggesting that creative ability may indeed affect an individual's sleep patterns. More specifically, out of the sixty children tested on a standard creativity test, seventeen of the ''highly creative'' children indicated that they had higher levels of sleep disturbance (compared to only eight of the ''control'' children). * In another study that examined the interactive relationships between sleep, fatigue, creativity and personality, participants were given the "Sleep Questionnaire", the "Fatigue Inventory", the "Remote Association Test" and the "Probabilistic Orientation Test". The researchers found that arousal measures of sleep and fatigue were meaningfully related to one another, but not to measures of thinking and of attitudinal orientations. Most importantly, they found that creativity was not significantly related to any of the dimensions of sleep.

Studies that reject creative insomnia

* In a series of three studies that analyzed the link between creativity, dreams, and sleep behaviors, researchers discovered that: (1) participants who were classified as "fast sleepers" (those who fell asleep quickly) were more likely to score highly on a creativity test, (2) participants who scored highly on a creativity test were more likely to solve their problems through dreams and to fall asleep quickly, and (3) adults in creative occupations have significantly more dream distortion, visual mentation, and regressive dream content.Sladeczek, I. and Domino, G. (1985) Creativity, sleep and primary process thinking in dreams. ''Journal of Creative Behavior'' 19:1, pp. 38–46, 55.

References

{{SleepSeries2 Sleep Sleep physiology Learning Creativity