Dreams and creativity: how to incubate a dream to solve a problem

Why dreams can help you create

The link between dreams and creativity has a sensible basis. While you dream, your mind mixes recent and old memories, puts together people who never met and drops objects into impossible places. That freedom to connect distant ideas looks a lot like what we ask of creativity: spotting a connection that wouldn't occur to us during the day.

That doesn't mean dreams hand over finished answers. More often they leave an image, a feeling or an unexpected twist that someone who knows their field recognizes as useful once awake. The dream supplies raw material; turning it into something is still your work.

What dream incubation is

Dream incubation means going to sleep with a question or topic chosen on purpose, intending to dream about it. The word goes back to ancient Greece, where some people slept in the temples of Asclepius hoping a dream would bring an answer about their health. Today the term has no religious meaning: it's a technique for steering what you dream about.

In 1993, psychologist Deirdre Barrett published a study in the journal Dreaming with 76 college students. Each one picked a problem of their own, academic, personal or practical, and for a week went over it every night before bed, following a set of incubation instructions. About half recalled at least one dream they judged to be related to their problem, and most of those felt the dream held a solution.

Read that result with some care: the participants themselves judged whether a dream addressed their problem, and in some cases the idea came after waking, while they thought about the dream. Still, the study showed something worth knowing: with a bit of intention, many people manage to dream about what they chose. Barrett kept exploring the subject in her book The Committee of Sleep, which gathers accounts from artists, scientists and athletes.

The edge of sleep: hypnagogia

Hypnagogia is the stretch when sleep is just arriving: thoughts loosen, brief images flicker up and ideas stop following logic. It roughly matches N1, the lightest stage of sleep. Plenty of creative people claimed to use it. Thomas Edison is said to have dozed holding metal balls that woke him when they dropped, and Salvador Dalí described a similar trick with a key falling onto a plate. These are anecdotes, but they inspired a serious experiment.

In 2021, Célia Lacaux, Delphine Oudiette and their team at the Paris Brain Institute published "Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot" in Science Advances. The 103 participants worked on number problems that hid a shortcut. Those who didn't find it got a 20-minute break, reclining and holding a light object in one hand, while their sleep was recorded. Among those who drifted into N1 without going deeper, 83% later found the shortcut, compared with about 30% of those who stayed awake. People who reached the N2 stage lost that advantage.

The finding points to a sweet spot: dozing for a few seconds or minutes may help, but sinking into sleep doesn't. It's one study with small groups, and its authors present it as a starting point.

Dormio: incubation with a device

At the MIT Media Lab, Adam Haar Horowitz and colleagues, including sleep researcher Robert Stickgold, built Dormio, a hand-worn device that detects when you start falling asleep. At that moment a recorded voice reminds you of the chosen theme, for example "think of a tree", and shortly after it gently wakes you to ask what you were dreaming. They described the method, which they named targeted dream incubation, in the journal Consciousness and Cognition in 2020.

In a follow-up study published in Scientific Reports in 2023, with 49 participants, those who napped with the theme reminder scored higher on creativity tests than those who napped without it or stayed awake. And the more often the tree showed up in their dreams, the better they did on the related tasks. Again: small samples and promising results, not a guaranteed formula.

Famous dream-inspired ideas, with the fine print

Stories of dreamed-up discoveries get retold constantly, and not all of them survive a closer look. Here are the best-known ones, with what we actually know about each.

• Otto Loewi, a pharmacologist, said that before his famous 1921 experiment, he dreamed of it two nights in a row: stimulate the nerve of a frog's heart and transfer the fluid around it to a second heart. The first time he scribbled the idea down in the night and couldn't read his own handwriting in the morning; the second time he went straight to the lab. The experiment showed that nerves communicate through chemicals and helped earn him the 1936 Nobel Prize.
• Paul McCartney said he woke up with the melody of "Yesterday" in his head at the London home of Jane Asher's family. He went to the piano to play it and spent weeks asking other musicians whether he had copied it without realizing. While he searched for lyrics, he sang it with placeholder words: "Scrambled eggs." Sources disagree on the exact date.
• Mary Shelley wrote in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein that the novel's central image came to her in 1816, on a night when she couldn't sleep, lying in bed with her eyes closed. She describes less a dream than a vision at the edge of sleep, much like hypnagogia.
• Dmitri Mendeleev and the 1869 periodic table: the story that he saw it whole in a dream comes from an account someone else told years later. Historians consider it doubtful, since he had spent years working on how to order the elements.
• August Kekulé and the benzene ring: in an 1890 speech, twenty-five years after proposing the structure, he said he pictured it while dozing by the fire, seeing a snake biting its own tail. There's no record of him mentioning it earlier, and historians still debate whether it was a faithful memory or an embellished anecdote.

How to incubate a dream tonight

This method draws on the instructions used in incubation studies. You don't need any gadgets, just a notebook and some patience.

• Pick one question or one concrete topic that truly matters to you: a chapter that won't move, a work decision, an unfinished melody.
• Write it as a short phrase and leave the paper by your bed, next to your dream journal and a pen, or your phone in airplane mode for voice notes.
• Before turning off the light, spend a few minutes going over the problem. If you can, turn it into an image: the blank page, the closed door, the piece that won't fit.
• As you fall asleep, silently repeat your intention, for example: "Tonight I want to dream about this problem." If your mind wanders, return to it without forcing.
• When you wake, in the night or in the morning, stay still for a few seconds with your eyes closed and replay what you dreamed before you move.
• Write everything down, even if it seems unrelated: an image, a color, a phrase, a feeling. Sometimes the answer arrives in disguise and you only recognize it days later, rereading.
• Repeat for several nights. In Barrett's study, people tried for a week.

A variation: the edge-of-sleep nap

If you'd rather use hypnagogia, try a short nap inspired by the Paris experiment. Sit in a comfortable armchair, think about your problem and hold a light object that makes a noise when it falls, like a plastic bottle or a set of keys. Close your eyes and let your mind drift.

When the object drops, or when you notice yourself slipping away, open your eyes and jot down right away whatever was going through your mind. There's no need to sleep longer: the idea is to stay on that shore. A practical note: if you have trouble sleeping at night, skip long afternoon naps.

Realistic expectations and protecting your sleep

Incubation doesn't work the same way for everyone or every night. Some people dream about their topic right away; others only indirectly, or never. And a dream about your problem doesn't guarantee a solution. Treat it as a curious experiment, not a test.

Most important, don't trade sleep for creativity. Getting enough sleep is itself one of the best supports for memory and clear thinking. If the exercise keeps you up or makes you anxious, set it aside for a while. And if you have insomnia or another sleep problem, talk with a health professional before experimenting with nighttime awakenings or naps.