#ThinkfullyHabit: Dream on
In February 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had a dream. It turned out to be quite an important dream which delivered an important outcome – the periodic table. Mendeleev had been working tirelessly to solve an incredibly complex problem: how to logically organise all the known elements in the universe. He had created a set of cards of all the elements that he would regularly shuffle and deal, with the hope that he find the rules that would explain how they all fitted together. He did this repeatedly and failed to crack the code. However, it was his dreaming brain that eventually solved what his awake brain could not. One night he dreamt of swirling ingredients and in a moment, they snapped together to form a grid.
“I saw a dream of 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, chemist
It's becoming well understood that after a period of consciously and deliberately trying to resolve an issue, it is often when we then stop consciously trying that breakthroughs may come.
Dreaming isn’t only useful for matters of cosmic magnitude. Take Paul McCartney’s creation of the song ‘Yesterday’. In November 1963 he woke with a complete melody in his head. He went straight to his piano to play it. He had literally dreamed the melody that went on to become one of the most widely recorded songs of all time.
Researchers have found that greater dream recall is associated with greater measures of creativity.
WHY?
Psychologists Schredl & Erlacher found that around 8% of all dreams provide creative solutions to a problem*.
Researchers Mauricio Sierra-Siegert and team at the Colegiatura Colombiana** conducted an experiment to compare people who kept a dream log for nearly a month with those who kept a journal of vivid episodes from their previous day for the same period of time. They found improving dream recall significantly increased performance on key creativity measures. They put this down to increased dream awareness being responsible for “loosening” stereotyped thinking patterns in those people; allowing them to be more creative. They also found that those who started out remembering the fewest dreams on average went from remembering one dream a month to one a week; suggesting that even for those of us who rarely remember their dreams, keeping a dream diary can be an effective way to increase dream recall.
Even if keeping a dream diary doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, at the very least it’s worth a pause on awakening to ask yourself if you can remember any of your dreams before jumping straight on with your day. After all, as Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett reminds us, “dreams are just thinking in a different biochemical state.”
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