Dream On
In the above quote, I think Edgar Allan Poe meant daydreaming, brainstorming, or carving out time during a busy day for creative expression. I don’t think the man meant a nap. Poe famously referred to naps as “little slices of a death.”
For my part, I’ve always agreed with him. I’ve never been great at sleeping through the night, let alone taking a power nap. In my mind, there’s nothing less empowering than waking up disoriented in the middle of the day. Even during my year with baby twins, I couldn’t do it. A nap, to me, has only ever felt like wasted time.
When we parse writers’ routines, we often ask when they work - specifically, the ratio of their work to their sleep. In their responses, every writer claims a tribe. The night owls. The early birds. The unfathomable in-between-creatures who set their alarm for three or four AM. Intuitively, we recognize that our relationship to rest contributes to our best work. One hinges on the other. And we work most effectively when our internal circadian rhythm matches our creative routine.
But what if we’re asking the wrong questions? What if what matters most isn’t when we sleep but how we sleep - and which part of the sleep cycle we can remember?
In 2023, a study from MIT and Harvard Medical School found that we can use short naps as a tool to find creative solutions. In that liminal space when we transition from wakefulness to sleep, researchers found that our creative capacity expands. That gentle stretch of time is known as “sleep onset,” and the dreams arising from it offer rich insight into completing creative tasks.
Many of us (myself included) make a list of concerns before going to bed to sleep - an information dump designed to promote better sleep. In this study, researchers here instead advised participants in prompting known as “targeted dream incubation.” Apps would instruct participants to dream about certain subjects and would wake them as soon as they reached the sleep onset phase.
Participants who napped with targeted dream incubation performed markedly more creatively than those who did not. They were better storytellers. They performed better as divergent thinkers. They synthesized information better from the standpoint of semantic distance. In a nutshell, they were better able to harness the power of their own minds.
We can easily try this one at home. We can focus our minds, take a nap, and set a timer. Alternatively, we can wait for bedtime - because a dream journal might also improve our creative endeavors.
In 2017, research from the Journal of Creative Behavior found that keeping a dream journal improves creativity. Utilizing the classic Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, researchers found that participants improved their creative outlook with their dream journals. Interestingly, researchers noted a “cross-fertilization” between sleeping and consciousness, allowing for greater creative leaps.
Maybe Poe and I got it wrong. Maybe, in daydreaming only while we’re awake, we’re using less of our internal resources. Maybe a nap, or a long night’s rest, isn’t wasted time at all. And we can be nudged through a creative block by tapping into a wellspring of instinctual, unconscious problem-solving capabilities. Sometimes, we find the path forward only after we close our eyes.
