Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance
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26% increase in task performance through targeted dreaming
This study prompted sleeping participants to dream about a specific topic. It focuses both on demonstrating that targeting dreaming is possible, and that targeting dreaming can drive creativity. This scientific experiment took place in a sleep laboratory.
What did they do?
There is a short period of time between sleeping and dreaming, called hypnagogia or N1. This is a sleep stage with spontaneous, vivid dreams that often reflect recent awake experiences. Most people experience it every night, as a normal part of falling asleep.
In this study, sleeping participants wore a device that allowed the scientists to track their sleep stage. During the N1 sleep stage, the scientists played an audio message to the participants. The recording instructed them to “remember to think of a tree.”
Once the participants were awake, they were asked to complete three tree-related creativity task. The Creativity Storytelling Task (write a creative story including the word tree), the Alternative Uses Task (list all the creative, alternative uses you can think of for a tree), and the Verb Generation Task (write the the first verb that comes to mind for each tree-related noun). Human raters judged their performance.
What did they find?
The scientists were able to prompt participants to dream about trees. 70% of the dreams that the participants reported included trees.
Creativity on tree-related tasks also improved following the tree dreams. Compared to a control group, the tree-dreaming group were more creative on every task. The biggest difference was seen for the Alternative Uses Tasks. The group that had been prompted to dream about trees scored 4.2 out of 5. The control group, that had slept, but hadn’t dreamed about trees, scored only 3.2 out of 5.
Horowitz, A.H., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T.V. et al. Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Sci Rep 13, 7319 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31361-w