Creativity and Why We Should Sleep On It

By Kate Dowler

In part three of our series on Creative Health, we continue to explore how we might balance our health in its broadest sense with an ability to be at our most creative when we need and want to be. 

In this article, we explore the impact of sleep and, when it comes to creativity, why we should sleep on it—making the most of using the space before, during, and after sleep, whether that’s a quick catnap or a restful night.

“As someone who tends to have their best ideas when falling asleep, I’ve always been interested in the power of sleep for creative problem solving and the different ways in which we can harness the power of sleep within creative work” — Kate Dowler.

The Science of Dream Creativity

Matthew Walker’s fascinating book Why we Sleep, is a great read for anyone interested in understanding more about the role of sleep more generally. It details the many ways in which quality sleep can bring benefits to all areas of your health. 

For our investigation into harnessing the creative power of sleep, we’ve been inspired by the chapter in the book dedicated to dream creativity, in which Walker describes a range of real world examples and experiments which demonstrate the link between sleep and creative problem solving.

Sleep and Creative Problem Solving

One of the best known historical examples is the story of how Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev came to imagine the order of elements in the periodic table in 1869. For many years, Mendeleev had been trying to work out the organisational logic to all the known elements. He created a card deck, each with a different element, which he would continually shuffle and re-arrange to try and make sense of the structure. After many waking attempts trying to solve the problem, one night in 1869, he dreamed the solution. 

“I saw in a dream a table, where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary” — Dmitri Mendeleev.

Sleep and the Sweet Spot for Creativity

Much of the scientific research to date has focussed on REM sleep, a stage in the sleep cycle where the hierarchy of logical associative connections present during waking hours is gone. During REM sleep, the brain makes connections between distantly related memories or concepts, seeking out distance and non-obvious links between sets of information (Cai et al., 2009). 

It’s well known in the field of innovation and creativity that combining unrelated concepts to look for new connections is one of the key paths to creative insight. And, when you are looking for more transformational creativity, increasing the inspirational distance between the two concepts can help to generate more unexpected and original ideas (Gonçalves et al., 2013). So, it appears the REM dream state is particularly good at replicating this effect.

Another point in the sleep cycle which has been demonstrated to be a sweet spot for creativity is sleep onset—also known as N1 or hypnagogia (Lacaux et al., 2021). During this transitional state, we drift between wakefulness and sleep, with the brain starting to make connections between different concepts and memories. Thomas Edison was known to take advantage of sleep onset to help him solve tricky problems. He would intentionally sit down for a nap, holding a metal ball in his hand. On falling asleep, the ball would drop onto the floor wake him up, at which point he would often have a new solution in mind.

When Do You Have Your Best Ideas?

Within the scientific literature around dream creativity, it’s clear that sleep can help to generate new ideas and help with creative problem solving—but how significant is this? How important is sleep overall when thinking about how creative we are as individuals? Is it simply just one of many points in our day when we are creative?

To find out more about this, we ran a quick phase of consumer research using the Voxpopme platform to find out what people think. We asked a sample of 100 people from the UK, US and Australia , “When do you have your best ideas?”

This is what they told us:

On analysing the data, what was most striking was the high proportion of people (59%) who claimed that they are most creative after sleep, either when waking in the middle of the night (20%) or first thing in the morning (39%). Just before falling asleep was the next most commonly mentioned (16%), typically in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogia). So, sleep-related categories accounted for 75% of all answers.

This is a powerful finding, especially when you consider that most creative sessions and workshops are run during working hours, and in an environment which is as far removed as you could be from sleep.

So, what does this mean for creative practice?

Experiments in Harnessing the Creative Power of Sleep

The findings from our consumer research, combined with the scientific literature, certainly challenge conventional innovation methods structured around creative sessions and workshops which happen during office hours. It suggests that a wider range of tools and processes to enhance individual creativity, including changing the context (environment and time of day) in which these exercises occur can have a big impact on the overall creative output for a project.

Researchers at MIT have been looking into the creative potential of the hypnagogic stage, or rather sleep onset, finding that when people receive auditory prompts to dream about a particular theme as they fall asleep, they perform strongly on creative tasks related to this theme when they awake from a short nap—similar to Thomas Edison (Horowitz et al., 2023). 

Keen to experiment yourself?

If you’re curious, try out the technique of targeted dream incubation, the focussed nature of this approach makes it suitable for tackling specific creative problems, and there is a simple online tool you can use, Dormio, which replicates the study protocol using a simple timer rather than physiological tracking.

It’s also worth bearing in mind the importance of getting enough sleep. Sleep deprivation is well known to have a negative impact on overall cognitive performance, and research has shown that the more creative, divergent and innovative aspects of cognition do appear to be degraded by lack of sleep (Killgore, 2010).

Conclusion

When it comes to our Creative Health, sleep is a tool that brings benefits not just to our health in its broadest sense but also as a tool that can be harnessed to help increase our creativity.

So, the next time you are working on a creative challenge, think about how you might leverage the agenda, activities or context to make sure the team have an opportunity to sleep on it!

Want to know more about Creative Health?

If like us, you are ever-curious about the links between creativity and health, be sure to check out our previous articles on the topic where we translate the science into day-to-day creative practice.

• Zen and the Art of Creativity — Exploring how bringing mindfulness to your innovation practice could be deliberately harnessed as a tool to boost the creative power of teams.

• Exercise and Creativity — Exploring the link between physical activity and creativity by asking the question, can exercising make us more creative?

References

Cai, D.J., Mednick, S.A., Harrison, E.M., Kanady, J.C., & Mednick, S.C. (2009) REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. PNAS 106 (25) 10130-10134

Gonçalves, M., Cardoso, C., & Badke-Schaub, P. (2013) Inspiration peak: exploring the semantic distance between design problem and textual inspirational stimuli, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 1:4, 215-232.

Horowitz, A.H., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T.V., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2023) Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Sci Rep 13, 7319.

Killgore, W.D.S. (2010) Effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. Progress in Brain Research 185 (105-129).

Lacaux, C., Andrillon, T., Bastoul, C., Idir, Y.,  Fonteix-Galet, A., Arnulf I., & Oudiette, D. (2021) Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot.  Sci. Adv. 7 (50).