Exploring Hypnagogia: The Frontier of Creativity in the In-Between
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The relationship between sleep, dreaming, and creativity has been the subject of conjecture for hundreds of years. The American inventor Thomas Edison had designed a strategy for mining his dreams for material. He would doze off with a steel sphere in each hand. Once his body went limp with sleep, the spheres would drop to the floor with a clatter and wake him up. He could then recall details of his dreams and record any insights…
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Scientific studies seem to validate these tales. Study participants asked to “incubate” a problem in their dreams often come up with a useful solution, and both the frequency and complexity of one’s dream recall have been correlated with higher scores on creativity evaluations. The stage of sleep most closely associated with creative inspiration is known as REM, short for rapid eye movement. REM sleep begins about 70 minutes after a person loses consciousness and is rich with dream life. Lucid dreams, in which the dreamer knows he or she is dreaming and can sometimes direct the dream, are thought to primarily occur in REM…
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But researchers have recently identified another state of mind that lies in the transition between waking and sleeping and may be even more fertile for creative inspiration than REM. It is called N1 or sleep onset, and it is the first of three stages in pre-REM sleep. N1 is a hybrid, or “semilucid” state of mind, says French neuroscientist Celia Lacaux, when individuals are just beginning to detach from the waking environment. This shadowy frontier between waking and dreaming, to which all sleepers have access, may be the source of many of humanity’s most novel ideas, inventions, and works of art. Psychologists call it “hypnagogia,” after the Greek words for “sleep” (hypnos) and “to lead” (agogo). Inspired by Thomas Edison, Lacaux had study subjects nap with a plastic bottle that dropped when they fell asleep, waking them. They were then tested to see if they could solve a math problem with a hidden rule. She found that those who woke from the earliest stage of sleep were far more likely to solve the problem.
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Like REM sleep, N1 often features involuntary dream-like perceptual phenomena. These are known as hypnagogic hallucinations, and they combine details from recent waking experiences with loosely associated memories in novel or unusual ways. The difference is that in N1, the dreamer is closer to the surface of sleep, to conscious control and to the external perceptual environment.
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A relationship between hypnagogia and creativity makes intuitive sense. One major theory of creativity posits that it results when our minds make connections between distantly related concepts stored in our memories. This is a process that is thought to occur naturally during sleeping and dreaming: New memories mingle in novel and abstract ways with older ones as a means of consolidating them, laying down tracks in our brains for later recollection. Neuroscientist Karl Friston, who studies consciousness, proposes that this mashing together of old and new is a process that helps to minimize redundancy and complexity in our memory system, and prepares us to navigate a fuller range of possible scenarios in our waking lives…
