Take note of your dreams

Make use of your brain's more creative ideas

This week’s Vanderhacks are all focused on sleep. Getting enough sleep, in an orderly fashion (about the same amount every night) tends to make people feel better and more productive. That’s all great.

But another reason to take sleep seriously is that it gives us access to some of the more “out there” parts of our creative brains. Dreams are fascinating, and if you can capture some of them you might have a useful source of ideas.

At night, in my dreams…

Scientists are still working out exactly what goes on in the brain while you’re sleeping, but the part of the brain that works during dreams is associated with memory. Your brain pulls together fragments of experiences and emotions from recent and ancient history to create a movie you’ve never seen before. That’s why, all of a sudden, you and your boss are both sitting in Mrs. Schiller’s algebra class (and you’re panicked about an assignment you forgot to do).

Some dreams are comically self-explanatory. A fair number of the ones I actually remember are about trying to find a bathroom…probably because I have to go to the bathroom and my body is waking me up to go and we tend to most remember the last bits of dreams before waking. Sadly, I am not getting any real insights or ideas from this!

But sometimes I have. Some twenty years ago I had a dream about a dollhouse store, and that rather beguiling image eventually became a core part of my novel, The Cortlandt Boys. Many years later I had a dream about three friends and their various romantic entanglements. I wrote something related to that, and the plot itself didn’t work, but the characters I developed of those three women got reused in Juliet’s School of Possibilities.

You should see the things we do…

From what I can tell, learning to remember details from dreams is something of a skill. People get better at dream recall when they actively try to recall dreams. So keep a journal next to your bed and jot down anything you can remember (you could also email yourself or send a voice memo — just be careful about rousing your partner out of their dreams!).

Also, recognize that dreams are just a starting point. Don’t expect ideas to emerge from your dreams fully formed. Sadly, you will most likely not get an idea for a billion dollar business, complete with product packaging and a marketing campaign, from your dreams. But you might see images or recall emotions that could be useful as you brainstorm ideas during the day.

Many of us need all the ideas we can get. So, best to use any source available to us — and dreams can be a pretty wild one.