Enhancing Creativity Through Dream Engineering

A group of researchers has found a direct link between dream incubation, hypnagogic states and creativity.

Fascinating new research that confirms what creative minds like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison intuited long ago - the drowsy period as we drift off to sleep can supercharge our creative abilities. Researchers from MIT and Harvard (Horowitz et al., 2020, 2023) demonstrated that deliberately influencing dreams during sleep onset (known as N1 sleep or hypnagogia) can significantly boost creative thinking.

Using a sensor-laden device called Dormio that detects when people enter this generative sleep stage, the team conducted a targeted dream incubation (TDI) experiment in which they prompted participants think about trees as they dozed off. The results were remarkable. People who had tree-related dreams during sleep onset performed far better on subsequent creativity tests than those who stayed awake or slept without the tree prompt. Even more intriguingly, the more that participants incorporated trees into their drowsy dreams, the more creative their later responses became.