The Science Behind the Center for Organizational Dreaming
The Foundations of Our Framework
Our work is built on over 100 years of research - spanning fields as diverse as computational neuroscience and psychodynamic theory. Here we summarize a few of our favourite articles, by leading thinkers in the emerging world of dreaming.
62% of team’s creative outcomes predicted by leader’s dream habits
Creativity, Organizational Knowledge, and the Power of Dreams (Schiavone & Villasalero, 2013). This study explores how dreams are liked to creativity in real-world corporate projects. It focuses on the role of dreaming on leadership style of project managers.
What did they do?
This scientific paper looked at 10 projects from two high-tech companies, both large research facilities in Spain. The scientists measured the of the way project managers led, performed, and dreamed.
The leadership style of each project manager was measured through interviews with them, and with the senior managers of the research facility. The scientists were interested in knowing how the project managers would ideally organize their project members, assuming there were no barriers to do so. Each project manager was assigned a leadership style: hierarchical, group, team, and clan.
The hierarchy-like organizational ideal is based on a rigid distribution of tasks amongst the project members, a great deal of centralization of decision-making and an extensive use of formal reporting to the project manager. The clan-like team had the highest level of decentralized decision making, and the one in which a sense of belonging, mutual support, and empathetic behaviour was the rule.
The creativity of each project was measured by asking the project managers, and their senior managers, to rate the project.
The dreaming style of each project manager was measured by asking them to rate their dreams for emotional intensity, creativity, and vividness.
What did they find?
The scientists found a link between dream creativity and project creativity (Pearson r = .624, p = .027). That is to say, project managers with emotionally vivid dreams were rated by the senior leaders of their company as producing more creative outcomes.
Looking specifically at leadership styles, the scientists noticed some key differences between the success and dreaming patterns of hierarchy project managers and clan project managers. The clan project mangers were far more likely to report emotionally vivid dreams. Their projects were also rated as 3x as creative as the projects of the hierarchy project managers.
26% increase in task performance through targeted dreaming
Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance (Horowitz et al., 2023). 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.
9% increase in empathy after dream-sharing between employees
Dream sharing and the enhancement of empathy: Theoretical and applied implication (Blagrove et al., 2021). This study looks at how sharing a dream improves a relationship between two people who already know each other. It focuses on the increased empathy we feel towards someone after hearing about their dream.
What did they do?
This scientific paper studied 21 sets of friends sharing dreams with one another in a laboratory environment. The scientists measured empathy levels between the two people before a dream sharing session, and empathy after the session.
The amount of baseline empathy each person felt for their dream-sharing partner was measured using a questionnaire. It asked questions like “I can relate to what my friend / partner goes through.” Participants rated each question on a 10-point scale. They were assigned an empathy score ranging from 0 to 120.
One member of the pair was assigned the role of “dream-sharer.” The other member was given the role “dream-listener.” The dream-shared spent around 20 minutes telling the dream-listener about a recent dream. Both members of the pair had a discussion together about what the dream could mean.
After the session, the scientists made a second measure of how much empathy each person felt for their dream-sharing partner.
What did they find?
The scientists found that after the dream-sharing session, the amount of empathy the dream-listener felt towards the dream-sharer had increased significantly.
Surprisingly, this pattern was only seen for pairs that started the experiment with low levels of empathy for one another. For this group, mean empathy level of the dream-listener increased from 79 to 83. If the partners already felt close, there was little change.