Dream On

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Small Dream in Red 1925 Wassily Kandinsky

We are both known for our vivid dreams. We’ve mentioned some of them to friends, but have hesitated to relate others, for fear our friends might balk at the outlandishness of our nighttime adventures in dreamland. Our dreams range from the harrowing to the absurd and sometimes the hilarious.

It’s common knowledge that sleep brings almost hallucinogenic imagery, the result of random mixing of memories and images, but most people retain very little memory of all the adventures they experience in their sleep. Science, however, is learning more and more about the mechanism of what is happening. One of the discoveries is that creative people tend to have more creative dreams and to remember their dreams more clearly.

The study revealing this was conducted by Dr. David Watson, a psychologist at Notre Dame. By tracking 200 subjects over three months, he found that those who were high scorers on creativity tests given while a…