Take a nap and have a dream, and your creativity will skyrocket.
When Thomas Edison faced a difficult problem, he would take a nap while holding a metal ball. As he was about to fall asleep, the sound of the ball dropping would wake him up, and often he'd come up with new ideas. This centuries - old creative technique was finally proven by MIT scientists through a controlled experiment in 2023: Guiding the content of dreams during the N1 stage at the start of sleep can boost creativity by up to 78% after waking up. Even more astonishingly, the more times you dream about the theme, the better your creative performance will be. Now, you can also use this method to control your dreams and enhance your creativity.
Thomas Edison had a strange habit when confronted with difficult problems: He would sit on a chair, hold a metal ball in his hand, and then close his eyes. Just as he was on the verge of falling asleep, his hand would relax, and the metal ball would drop to the ground. The loud noise would wake him up. At this time, he often had new ideas for solving the problem in his mind.
This seemingly mysterious technique has been employed by countless creative workers for centuries. The painter Salvador Dalí also used a similar method. He held a key in his hand and placed a plate beneath. The sound of the key dropping was his alarm clock.
In 2023, researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School finally proved through experiments why this technique is effective. Their research was published in Scientific Reports. For the first time, a controlled experiment revealed a surprising discovery: During the first few minutes of sleep, when you're not fully asleep but no longer fully awake, if someone prompts you to dream about a specific theme, your creativity regarding this theme will be significantly improved after waking up.
The data is straightforward: Compared with those who stayed awake all the time, the creativity of the participants who were guided to dream about the "specific theme" increased by 78%. This is not a psychological suggestion but the real way the brain functions in a special state.
N1 Sleep: Why Are These Few Minutes So Special?
Scientists call the initial stage of sleep the N1 stage, or "hypnagogia." This stage is very brief, usually lasting only a few minutes, and it's a transition period from being awake to truly falling asleep. Adam Haar Horowitz, a post - doctoral fellow at MIT, described this state as follows: "It is psychedelic, loose, flexible, and divergent. It's like turning the knob of mind - wandering to the maximum, making it immersive. You will be propelled by new sensations, such as the feeling of floating or falling, and your thoughts will quickly enter and then get out of control."
In this state, the brain's control weakens, but you haven't completely lost consciousness. You can still hear sounds and respond to external stimuli. It's precisely this "half - awake and half - asleep" characteristic that makes the N1 stage the optimal stage to stimulate creativity.
So, what exactly makes N1 special? Why not other sleep stages?
In 2021, a study by the Paris Brain Institute provided the answer. They found that even if participants stayed in the N1 stage for only 15 seconds, the success rate of solving mathematical problems could triple. But the key is: If you enter the next sleep stage, N2, this effect disappears. In the N2 stage, the brain's control further diminishes. Although the dreams are more abundant, it's difficult to remember them after waking up, let alone utilize them.
N1 is precisely at an equilibrium point: The brain is relaxed enough to generate long - distance associations; at the same time, it's awake enough to remember these associations and use them after waking up. This is why Edison and Dalí would wake themselves up as soon as they started to fall asleep. If they were a bit later, they would lose the dreams.
Actually, there is early evidence indicating that dreams can aid in task performance. Previous studies have found that people who dreamt about a maze task performed ten times better in the maze test after waking up than those who didn't dream about it. And merely thinking about the maze when awake didn't confer any performance advantage. Similar phenomena also occurred in tasks such as foreign language learning, exam preparation, and story memory. People who dreamt about relevant content performed better after waking up.
However, there is an issue with these studies: Scientists can't control what you dream about. You may dream about the maze, or you may dream about something else. This makes it impossible to conduct a controlled experiment and determine the causal relationship. The research team at MIT wondered: Can we actively guide the content of dreams to improve creativity more precisely?
A Glove, 49 People, and a Carefully Designed Experiment
To answer this question, the research team designed a clever experiment. They recruited 50 healthy participants (the final effective sample was 49 people), with an average age of 26.7 years old, and an equal number of men and women. All of them arrived at the laboratory between 12:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. This time period was carefully selected because people are most likely to feel sleepy after lunch and more likely to enter the N1 state.
The tool they used was called Dormio, a wearable device that resembles a glove and can track three physiological indicators: heart rate change, skin conductance, and muscle tension. When these three indicators change to a certain extent (heart rate changes by more than 5 times per minute, skin conductance changes by more than 4 microsiemens, or muscle tension changes by more than 8 kilohms), it means you have entered the N1 stage.
After detecting N1, the device won't wake you up immediately. Instead, it will wait for 1 to 5 minutes - allowing you to stay in this state for a while and have time to dream. Then, the device will play a voice recording to wake you up and ask you, "Please describe what you were just thinking about." After you finish speaking, the device will give you another prompt and then let you continue to sleep. This cycle will last for 45 minutes.
The researchers randomly divided the 49 participants into four groups:
Group 1 (Sleep Incubation): Every time they were woken up, they would hear the prompt: "Remember, dream about a tree."
Group 2 (Sleep without Incubation): They also took a nap, but the prompt was: "Remember, observe your thoughts." (No specific theme was specified.)
Group 3 (Wakeful Incubation): They stayed awake and regularly heard: "Remember, think about a tree."
Group 4 (Wakeful without Incubation): They stayed awake and regularly heard: "Remember, observe your thoughts."
Why choose "tree"? Because it is specific enough to stimulate associations but not overly professional or abstract.
After 45 minutes, all participants took three creativity tests:
Creative Writing: Write a creative story containing the word "tree," which was scored by raters who were unaware of the participants' groupings.
Divergent Thinking: List various creative uses of a tree (such as "make guitar strings," "use as a sundial," "create a maze").
Semantic Association: When seeing a noun, say the associated verb (for example, when seeing "tree," do you think of "grow" or "remember"?)
The results were clear. Group 1, which was guided to dream about a tree, performed the best in all three tests. Without knowing the participants' groupings, the raters gave the highest scores to the stories of Group 1. Moreover, the creativity score of Group 1 was 43% higher than that of Group 2 (napped but without a specific theme) and 78% higher than that of Group 4 (stayed awake without a specific theme).
What's even more interesting is that within Group 1, those who dreamt about the tree more times wrote more creative stories. And they would directly incorporate the plots from their dreams into the stories. For example, the tree grew a human face, the roots turned into tentacles, and the trunk became a time tunnel. These images all originated from their dreams. "This is not just the effect of the N1 sleep state," said Kathleen Esfahany, an MIT undergraduate and one of the main authors of the study. "People are more creative because they are making use of their dreams."
The Mechanism of Dreams Enhancing Creativity: How the Brain Breaks the Routine
The research team also discovered an interesting phenomenon: People who took a nap produced word pairs with a greater "semantic distance" in the word - association test.
What is semantic distance? Simply put, it's how far apart two concepts are in meaning. For example, "mother" and "father" are close, while "mother" and "frog" are far apart. When awake, our brains tend to follow the regular path. When thinking of "tree," you will associate it with "leaves," "wood," "forest," which are all words with a close semantic distance.
However, during N1 sleep, the situation changes. The brain's cognitive control weakens, and it starts to connect things that are not usually connected. You may think of "tree - network" (the branching structure of a tree is like the Internet), "tree - time" (tree rings record time), "tree - skeleton" (the trunk is like a human spine). These are long - distance associations.
This is precisely the core mechanism of creativity. As early as 1962, the psychologist Sarnoff Mednick proposed the associative theory of creativity: Creative solutions often stem from identifying the associations between long - distance concepts in memory. Usually, our brains are too "rational" and always think along the known paths. The loose state in the N1 stage enables the brain to explore those connections that are usually overlooked.
If you are prompted to "dream about a tree" in this state, the brain will specifically search for long - distance associations related to the tree. After waking up, these associations become creative materials that you can utilize.
This also explains why many people suddenly come up with good ideas when taking a bath, going for a walk, or taking a nap. At these moments, the brain is in a relaxed but not completely shut - down state, similar to N1. With reduced cognitive control and increased long - distance associations, creativity naturally improves.
Previous studies have all faced a problem: If you give participants a task before going to sleep and then find that they dreamt about the task and their task performance improved after waking up, is it the effect of sleep itself or the effect of dreams? You can't tell. The MIT study cleverly solved this problem: They didn't give any task before going to sleep, only prompted a theme (tree) at the start of sleep, and then gave the task after waking up. Moreover, the more times you dream about the theme, the more obvious the improvement in creativity. This further proves that it's not simply "having slept," but "processing the theme in the dream" that is effective.
The report in Science quoted Horowitz's words: "Most people don't know that a part of their brain is naturally unrestrained. But they forget it every night." Now, we have a scientific method so that we don't have to forget it anymore.
How to Apply: You Can Also Control Your Dreams
The Dormio glove sounds very high - tech, but the research team emphasized that you don't need any special equipment to use this method. Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and one of the lead researchers, said, "Directed dream incubation doesn't require Dormio. Any device that can track sleep and play and record sounds can be used." The research team even created a simplified protocol that only requires a timer.
So, how exactly should you do it? Based on the experimental experience of the research team, the method is very simple:
Time Selection: The best time is from 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. After lunch, the human body naturally experiences post - prandial dip, making it easier to enter the N1 state. Avoid evenings because the sleep pressure at night is too high, and you may directly enter the N2 or deep - sleep stage, missing this "sweet spot" of N1.
Theme Selection: Think about the creative problem you want to solve and refine it into a word or phrase, such as "tree," "ocean," or "code structure." It should be specific enough to stimulate associations but not overly complicated.
Environment Preparation: Find a quiet place to ensure that you won't be disturbed. You can wear an eye mask, but don't completely block out the sound because you need to hear the alarm.
Falling Asleep Process: Set an alarm to ring in 10 to 15 minutes. Lie down, close your eyes, and repeatedly repeat your theme word. Don't force yourself to think; just let the word float in your mind. Let yourself enter a half - awake and half - asleep state.
Dream Recording: When the alarm rings, immediately describe what you just dreamt about. You can record it or write it down. Don't worry about not being able to describe it clearly. Even fragmented segments, vague feelings, or fleeting images are worth recording. In the Dormio experiment, there was no time limit for the participants' dream reports. Some people spoke for a few seconds, and some spoke for a few minutes, which was all okay.
Repeat the Cycle: Then go back to sleep and repeat this process 3 to 4 times. The whole process takes about an hour. You will record your dreams every time you wake up, and these dreams will become more and more abundant. The experimental data shows that the more times you dream about the theme, the more obvious the subsequent improvement in creativity.
Create Immediately: After waking up, you will find that there are many associations and images in your mind that don't usually appear. At this time, immediately start your creative work, such as writing, painting, designing, or programming. The effect will be much better than usual. Don't wait because the associations brought by N1 will gradually fade away within a few hours.
Pattie Maes, the leader of the MIT research, said, "Our goal is to provide people with tools to learn to control their own thinking."
The research team is now exploring several new directions. One is to test other sleep stages. Since N1 has been proven to be useful, what about REM sleep? The dreams in the REM stage are more vivid and narrative. Will they have a different impact on creativity? The second is to simplify the operation process. Although there is already a simplified protocol, can it be made even simpler? For example, can it be integrated into a smartwatch or a sleep - tracking app? The third is to expand the application scenarios. In addition to enhancing creativity, can directed dream incubation be used to treat nightmares? Can it help with memory consolidation? Can it assist in psychotherapy?
A report in Bloomberg commented, "These findings should remind us that the line between productivity and rest is blurred, especially in creative work." And the summary in Scientific American may be the most appropriate: "This verifies the experience of creative people over the centuries that there is a real connection between dreams and creativity."
Summary
If you're currently dealing with a creative problem, such as...