Here is a quote – All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level.
—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Sleep, whether we consider it important or not, constitutes almost one-third of the lifespan of an average human being. We cannot just ignore it. A regular lack of sleep can increase the risk of various diseases like Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and depression31. It also deeply affects our memory and cognition. However, the most common and probably the most irritating outcome of a lack of sleep is a bad mood.
The next time you are feeling bad about yourself, your job, your relationship or even the world, for that matter, ask yourself this simple question, ‘How much did I sleep last night?’ If the answer is four hours, three hours, or something even less, then that might be the actual reason for your bad mood. A positive reflection of the world requires inner contentment, more than any external state of affairs, of which sleep is an extremely important part.
Is modern life affecting the quality of your sleep?
According to a study conducted by Stony Brook University32, it was found that screen time (time spent on the TV, the computer or the mobile phone) had an adverse impact on the duration as well as the quality of sleep in 90 percent of cases. This is not all. Due to the recent technological boom, there has been a steep rise in the average screen time in the past few years. But the worst part is that it isn’t the adults that are facing the brunt of the situation, it is the children. Surveys have found that the average daily screen time of a child younger than nine years is more than two hours33.
The situation is alarming. We don’t want our children to grow up with the lifestyle diseases that plague us at an older age. Though there are plenty of educational games and videos that make learning easier for our children, they aren’t what your children should usually spend their time on. So rather than not allowing children to spend time on smartphones or the television, we should restrict their time by password-locking gadgets and by making our children operate them only under strict supervision.
Moreover, the light emitted by the gadgets confuses our body, making it believe that it is still daytime, consequently making it difficult for us to sleep. Therefore, we should make a strict decision of neither spending nor letting our children spend any time on a screen at least one hour before bedtime.
The Hard Worker vs the Dreamer
Depending upon one’s attitude towards sleep, we can broadly categorize people into hard workers and dreamers. Hard workers are those who make the most of their time, don’t pay attention to anything but work, and are ready to give up even their sleep for the sake of work. Dreamers, on the other hand, are those who don’t like working at all, who like spending most of their time in bed, and who can’t even think of giving up their sleep for anything. A hard worker who cannot dream and a dreamer who cannot do hard work are both of little value. A mixture of both the personalities is ideal.
Thanks to the supersonic modern lifestyle, we are beginning to incline more towards the hard worker attitude. Most of us are required to finish a definite amount of work every day. We have to meet daily deadlines and maintain a considerable pace in order to survive. Though this has led to unprecedented productivity, are we missing something? Aren’t we beginning to lose the creativity and the imaginativeness of a dreamer just because we want to stay on track?
If you think that your work has started resembling the pre-defined scribble of a robot, if you have stopped producing things long ago and started simply manufacturing them, then maybe it is time that you dream a little. Take some time off, stay at home or go to some peaceful place, and just relax. Ditch your gadgets and let all the impressions of your dull, monotonous life fade away. Doing this occasionally will help you discover new things, and become more ingenious as well as creative in your work.
The link between sleep and creativity
If a person were told to completely describe their thoughts, they would not be able to do so. Our mode of expression is limited, whereas our thoughts exist as a mixture of sounds, visuals, and emotions. Moreover, since we think about thousands of things at one time, it is humanly impossible to focus on and be aware of all our thoughts.
However, we can partially overcome this limitation during sleep. Sleep gives us access to those areas of our brain which we cannot consciously use during our waking hours. In the form of dreams, we witness our thoughts in an intensely symbolic way. We can literally touch them. If we can remember our dreams and are able to describe them successfully, that gives us access to our innermost thoughts. These are of significant value both from an artistic and a psychological point of view.
The dream book that inspired an art movement
During the summer of 1895, a then relatively unknown Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud, decided to write everything that he dreamt about. To accomplish that, he slept on a hard mattress (to avoid sinking into deep dreamless sleep) and kept a pen and paper by his side. Since the average human tends to forget 80 percent of what they dream about within ten minutes of waking up, Freud started making notes just after he woke up. He then spent the rest of the day analyzing and trying to find the meaning of his dreams.
After years of analyzing his own dreams as well as the dreams of his patients, Freud finally summarized his findings in the book titled The Interpretation of Dreams, which was published in 1899. The book details the types of dreams people usually have and, as the name suggests, gives the readers methods of interpreting their dreams and discovering their hidden meanings.
Due to its unconventional content, The Interpretation of Dreams met with a cold initial reception. But after a decade or so of its publication, as a consequence of the rising popularity of Freud, the book suddenly gained massive popularity. During Freud’s own lifetime, it came to be considered one of the most influential books humanity has ever produced. It ultimately inspired an art movement called Surrealism, which was at the forefront of western thought throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The movement included popular names like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, which are still among the most revered in western art.
A dreamer’s guide to creativity
People usually believe that what they dream about at night is not under their control. Well, this is not completely true. We can partly control our dreams, and by doing so, we can utilize their limitless creative potential. Research conducted by neuroscientists Jan Born and Ullrich Wagner provides conclusive evidence of this. In the study, it was found that people who fell asleep in the middle of solving a particular arithmetic problem were three times more likely to discover the shortcut that leads to its solution. The research concluded by saying that sleeping and dreaming about something facilitate the extraction of explicit knowledge and help in developing insightful behavior.
It is said that during his creative process, Salvador Dali would sometimes lie on a couch, looking at his inspiration, while holding a spoon in his hand. Once he passed into sleep, the spoon would drop on the floor, waking Dali. Then, in a somewhat dreamlike state, he made a rough sketch, which he ultimately utilized in his paintings. With the help of this method, he was able to use the powers of his subconscious mind, which he couldn’t have utilized when he was fully awake.
Research has shown that dreams, for the most part, are a visual representation of our deepest thoughts. These include – but are not limited to – important events that happened to us in our past, things that happened to us during the day, and most importantly, what we were thinking about before going to sleep. Of all these, we can easily control the third one.
For that, you should keep your creative work or some problem that you were trying to solve in front of you when you are about to go to sleep. Then, just after waking up, try to remember what you dreamt about and make a note of it. Once you are fully awake, try relating your dream to your problem or your creative work. Usually, before finding even a remote connection, you will need to use this technique for a couple of days. Using it every day for about a month might give you better results.
Though unconventional, this technique might prove a blessing in disguise for people suffering from any type of mental block. By employing certain methods, like the one mentioned above, if we are able to exploit even a tiny portion of our limitlessly creative subconscious mind through sound sleep, then it might ultimately help us in discovering our singular artistic voice.
