Inside mind's midnight movies: How dreams shape our creativity, solve our problems, heal our mind and prep us for life

In the early 1840s, Elias Howe toiled day and night to perfect a sewing machine at his workshop in Massachusetts. But something was wrong with the design. As he pondered over the mechanics, a bunch of warriors barged in and abducted him. They took him to a strange land where their king gave him an ultimatum: Deliver a working sewing machine in 24 hours, or die. Try as he might, Howe couldn’t do it. The deadline over, the warriors hauled him up for execution. But he could not help but notice something odd—the tip of each spear held by the warriors had a tiny, eye-like hole that seemed to stare at him. Howe then woke up, gasping, from the worst nightmare of his life. He was, however, overcome with excitement instead of dread. The nightmare had opened his eyes to a new possibility—the eye of the needle should not be at the butt, like in hand sewing, but at the tip, just like the spears in his dream. This was crucial in the discovery of the lockstitch mechanism that propelled the mass production of clothes in the 19th century.

This is just a glimpse of what our dreams, often dismissed as chaotic or meaningless, could achieve. Howe wasn’t the only one who got free R&D from the subconscious department. Mary Shelley dreamt Frankenstein into existence; Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements came to him in visions; Paul McCartney woke up humming the music of Yesterday. As a grad student, Larry Page dreamt about downloading the entire internet and keeping them as links, which eventually led to Google’s original PageRank algorithm.

Harvard professor Deirdre Barrett has extensively written about dream-inspired creativity in The Committee of Sleep. “Modern research shows that dreams arise primarily during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—a phase when emotion and visual areas of the brain are even more active than in waking, while logic and language regions are quieter,” she explains. “The dreaming mind then recombines familiar material in ways the waking mind would censor.”

So, basically, the prefrontal cortex, which acts as the logical sceptic in your brain, goes into a do-not-disturb mode during REM stage. On the other hand, the visual and emotional regions party like it is Friday night. Conventional filters relax and let odd connections spark. Your imaginations run wild and ignite breakthroughs. Your dreaming mind is having a go at the riddle you couldn’t crack when you were awake.

Productivity pundits who call for a 70-hour work week in India may find this a blasphemy—what if the secret to growing a company isn’t mandating a 14-hour grind for employees but rather letting them nap their way to success? A 2023 study by MIT and Harvard researchers found that just 15 seconds into the light sleep stage resulted in a threefold chance of solving a math problem. So the next time your boss asks why you are dozing at your desk, say that you are working on the next big idea.

Even athletes consult dreams for personal training sessions. Heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson discovered many of his signature punches during dreams, according to Barrett’s research. After a brief slump in his performance, golfer Jack Nicklaus dreamt that he was not holding the club right. On waking, he tried the dream grip and promptly got his swing back. 

Not just legends, mere mortals can solicit creative help from the sleeping mind. According to Barrett, the trick is “dream incubation”, which is essentially whispering a research request to your brain’s helpdesk before bedtime. It involves focusing on a question or image you want to explore before going to sleep and journalling your dream as soon as you wake up. “In one of my studies, 50 per cent of college students who incubated a real-world problem dreamt about it within a week. And 25 per cent were able to report genuine solutions,” she says.

The idea that dreams hold meaning isn’t new. As early as 3000 BCE, in what could be the oldest dream journal, Sumerians carved their nocturnal visions on clay tablets. King Gudea, who ruled the Sumerian city state of Lagash, rebuilt the temple dedicated to the god Ningirsu around 2100 BCE after a dreamy divine message: “I need a new abode.” The Akkadians compiled an 11-tablet guide to dream divination—the Iškar Zaqiqu—filled with rituals to chase away nightmares and decode their meanings.

In ancient Egypt, dream interpreters weren’t your average roadside fortune-tellers. They assumed VIP priestly status, whispering divine insights to the pharaohs before crucial decisions. Before becoming pharaoh, Thutmose IV had a dream while resting by the Great Sphinx of Giza. In the dream, the Sphinx promised him that he would be anointed pharaoh if he cleared away the drifting desert sands burying the statue. Once he took over the throne, he fulfilled the Sphinx’s wish and installed a granite tablet called the Dream Stele to record the event. Historians believe this was more of a propaganda as Thutmose was not the first in line to the throne. After all, nothing legitimises a questionable claim of succession like a giant stone billboard saying, “The Sphinx said it’s okay.”

The Greeks took the practice to the battlefield; no general would march without consulting a dream reader. According to Roman historian Flavius Josephus, Alexander the Great planned to ransack Jerusalem because of its loyalty to Persians. But he dreamt of a high priest clad in white robes greeting him at the city gates of Jerusalem. When he arrived at the city the next day, there stood the real-life version—Rabbi Jaddua. He showed the emperor the passages from the Book of Daniel, predicting a Greek king would conquer the Persians. Convinced he was the chosen one, Alexander spared the city. This might be the most successful ‘vibe check’ in military history.

Not everyone in antiquity bought the prophecy angle. Ever the sceptic, Greek philosopher Aristotle rejected the idea that dreams could predict the future. He argued that we accept such visions as real because of the suspension of judgment while sleeping. This theory is now backed by modern neuroimaging, which shows the brain’s frontal lobe being suppressed during dreams.

Aristotle’s theory did not find many takers among European psychoanalysts of the early 20th century. But his teacher Plato theorised that all humans have a lawless wild beast nature, which peers out during sleep in the form of dreams. 

Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud drew on Plato’s concept to develop his “wish-fulfilment” theory. While Plato saw human desire being played out more directly through dreams, Freud felt that dreams were suppressed wishes of people fulfilled during sleep. Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung—Freud’s protege-turned rival—had a different view. They famously had their first fallout while interpreting each others’ dreams while travelling to the US. Jung later came up with his own concept, known as the “collective unconscious”. It posits that we all share universal, inherited patterns of imagery that influence our dreams.

However, these understandings changed in the 1950s with the discovery of the REM stage of sleep when you are likely to have vivid dreams. If you use a smartwatch to track your sleep, you might already be familiar with various sleep stages. For the unversed, sleep is broadly divided into two stages: non-REM and REM. Non-REM has three sub-stages—N1, N2, and N3. And, your brain cycles through non-REM and REM stages three to four times during an eight-hour sleep. 

Studies indicate that you can have dreams during all sleep stages, says Tony Cunningham, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition and assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. “In N1, you can have some creative and bizarre thoughts mixed with hallucinations,” he tells THE WEEK. This is where hypnagogia kicks in—you see geometric shapes, flashes of light and occasionally experience that terrifying full-body jerk.

Then comes the N2 and N3 sleep stages that yield shorter, less emotional dream reports. These are more ‘thought-like’ and often built from specific events or memories, says Cunningham. REM sleep is where the dreams are typically longer, more bizarre and heavily woven from our long-term memories. Citing research on the roles of vivid dreams during REM and hallucinations during N1 stage in creativity, Cunningham says, “Research has found that both types of dreams can enhance creativity and help produce insights. It is probably more likely that they are working together to optimise the impact.”

While Howe’s sewing machine dream occurred during REM sleep, German chemist August Kekulé had his ‘Eureka’ moment in N1 stage. While pondering about the structure of benzene, he fell asleep in front of his fireplace. He saw the atoms dancing in twisted motions like a chain and they turned into a snake biting its own tail. This imagery inspired him to propose that the C₆H₆ structure of benzene must be made of a ring of carbon atoms, with a hydrogen atom attached to each of them.

Both Howe and Kekulé had their groundbreaking dreams accidentally. But Thomas Edison gamified the system. He used hypnagogic hallucinations to boost his creativity by napping in his armchair while holding a metal ball in one hand. As he fell asleep, the ball would drop, waking him up, often with a fresh idea. Salvador Dalí used to hold a heavy metal key as he drifted into the semi-lucid regions of the dreamworld. Dropping the key would wake him up and spark ideas for paintings that he famously described as “hand-painted dream photographs”. His 1931 painting, The Persistence of Memory, one of the most recognisable works of surrealism, depicts melting pocket watches that were inspired by one of his hypnagogic dreams.

Even contemporary artists have been inspired by their dreams. Kerala-based artist Sandeep Karunakaran, who is known as Sanskarans in the art community, reveals that since childhood, he had been having dreams filled with giant creatures, monsters, UFOs or unknown entities descending from the sky.

“They stay with me long after I wake up, leaving strong visual imprints that become part of my mental archive,” says Sanskarans. He translates these dream impressions into visual forms that he describes as retro-futuristic horror and science fiction. They are inspired by how his dreams feel rather than what they show.

“Over time, I came to understand that these dreams were not random,” explains Sanskarans. “They were shaped by everything I absorbed—films, ghost stories, documentaries and my own tendency to visualise intensely. Some of these visions evolved into nightmares, but rather than rejecting them, I learned to embrace them as creative fuel. The worlds I paint are, in many ways, extensions of those early dreamscapes.”

While all humans have an innate potential for dreaming, their cultural communities can have a big impact in either encouraging that potential or discouraging it, says Kelly Bulkeley, a US-based author and researcher in the fields of dreams and the psychology of religion. “Many Native American groups teach their children about dreams and perform dream-oriented rituals to enhance everyone’s awareness of and respect for dreaming,” he tells THE WEEK. “In contrast, totalitarian governments such as the Nazis treat dreams as politically dangerous and give them no space in people’s lives.” 

Barrett says indigenous, ancient or tribal traditions might see dreaming as a collective experience or a communication from gods or ancestors, rather than an individual’s private psychology. Some of these do have a dream interpreter who goes by more predetermined symbology, she adds.

Among Native Americans, the Yanomami community that lives in the Amazon rainforest treats dreams as real-world experiences, where the soul leaves the body to travel a multi-layered cosmos, providing knowledge and protecting the community. For the Xavante from central Brazil, dreams are considered messages carrying songs, myths or sacred stories given to individuals by mythic beings.

The dreamcatcher, a home decor product popularised in India through online shopping apps, has its origin among the North American Ojibwe people, who traditionally hang these charms over children to ward off bad dreams until sunrise. Neuroscientist Adam Haar Horowitz, who researches dreams at the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Sleep and Cognition, closely follows the Native American dream traditions. “If you touch people’s dream worlds, you have a duty to respect the cultures that have been tending dreams for millennia, not just harvest their imagery,” he says. “One side is a living, situated practice; the other is a commodity stripped of context.”

Another dream art that is often a victim of cultural appropriation is the aboriginal art in Australia. Many famous dot paintings of the Pintupi people and other similar cultures in the Western Desert bloc are often received by the painters during their dreams. Australia-based dream researcher Dan Keller has worked with aboriginal communities for years. He says people around the world are quite interested in the “exoticness” of aboriginal culture, but authentic gifts by local artists can be expensive. “There is always a steady flow of people making ‘aboriginal style’ things, whether it is souvenirs or design assets or artworks or fictional books about the culture, and everyone has to be vigilant to make sure those things are authentic and made by aboriginal people,” Keller tells THE WEEK.

Still, certain dream motifs transcend time and culture—flying, falling, having sex, meeting the dead or even teeth falling out. “Cultural variations can influence the details, but these are truly universal features of human dreaming experience,” says Bulkeley. For example, a flying dream could symbolise universal human desires for freedom, control and overcoming challenges. Falling teeth could mean two different things—for children, it could mean growth while for adults it could symbolise death, says Bulkeley.

Then there is the Threat Simulation Theory (TST), which proposes that dreaming evolved as a defence mechanism to rehearse dangerous situations in real life. You might often see dreams of being chased, attacked, lost, embarrassed or trapped. As per TST, that’s not an accident; those are the kind of situations where better preparation would help you survive, says Horowitz. “In that view, a nightmare is not just random suffering—it is a kind of training run for waking danger,” he adds. “I don’t think TST explains all dreams—there are also creative, social, emotional and meaning-making functions—but as a lens, it’s useful.”

Not every dream is trying to send you a cosmic memo. Some are just your brain’s idle chatter. Barrett points out that the trick is spotting the ones that actually matter. “Usually, the dream itself tells you which is which: the meaningful ones carry emotional weight, even if their storyline is strange. The more chaotic ones fade fast, like a half-formed daytime fantasy,” she explains.

Dreams are a big part of Indian culture, too. The Upanishads describe dream as a state where “the mind creates its own internal reality”. The ancient Indian practice of Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation that brings you into a state between waking and sleeping.

A similar practice is the Tibetan Dream Yoga (TDY), prominent among Buddhist monks in India and Tibet. It involves lucid dreaming, which is when you realise that you are dreaming while still asleep, says S. Gabriela Torres Platas, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, Illinois. She has been carrying out clinical trials to explore how dream yoga can help treat mental health issues. Once they gain awareness while dreaming, TDY practitioners work on transforming their dream content like facing fears, dissolving scary images or meditating within the dream. Advanced stages of TDY involve awareness even in dreamless sleep.

Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan credited his famous theorems to Namagiri Thayar, the presiding goddess of the Narasimha Swamy Temple in Namakkal, Tamil Nadu, who guided him during his sleep. He described that during sleep he would see “a red screen formed by flowing blood” on which a hand would write down formulas.

For many, dreams also play a profound emotional and therapeutic role. Blues singer Dana Gillespie tells THE WEEK that she has often had enlightening dreams about Sathya Sai Baba, her spiritual mentor. More than just the usual nonsense chaotic dreams, these were dreams with “instructions on how to live”, she points out. The first of such dreams occurred when she was young and stranded in Turkey. “My best friend had missed the flight so I had to spend a week waiting for him. On my first night alone, I cried myself to sleep, rather worried about being in a place that I didn’t know at all,” she recalls. “But that night I had one of Sai Baba’s special comforting dreams.” She dreamt she had been taken to his interview room in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, something that in waking life didn’t occur until 12 years later.

Dreams are also unsung therapists for your emotional wounds. Take the temples of Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing, for instance. They weren’t just places of worship, but sites of “therapeutic dream incubation”. “Sick people came to the temple to pray, bathe, exercise, eat a special diet and sleep at night within the temple, where Asclepius would provide a dream to guide the healing process,” Bulkeley points out. Fast forward to today, and modern therapists do the same, except with a bit more couch time and fewer toga parties.

Sleep can help us process bad memories in a way that we are less reactive to them when we recall them, says Cunningham. According to him, REM dreams help us replay emotionally loaded memories, but in a safe, offline way. It is more like watching a horror movie with the sound turned off. Nevertheless, there is a catch. If you have been through post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that whole emotional-detox feature can glitch, he warns. Instead of soothing cinematic reruns, you might get the director’s cut of your worst trauma on repeat. Spoiler alert—there is no happy ending.

Therapists like Barrett have a clever hack for this: rewrite the script of your recurring nightmare with a “mastery dream”, which involves rehearsing an alternate ending. Think of it like switching from a slasher film to a cartoon clip—Peeping Tom who stalks you is now just Tom the cat and you are the mouse chasing him for a change. Many survivors of childhood sexual abuse choose to make their abuser listen to them and describe how their acts were wrong in their dreams. “Just as repetitive nightmares make people more fearful by day, mastery dreams carry over into a sense of strength or comfort,” explains Barrett.

Dreams also indirectly play the role of a memory janitor. Your brain is said to engage in overnight housekeeping during sleep while dreams act as a filter that helps you forget or remember things. 

“This is actually reflected in dream content. Dreams during non-REM tend to be about much more recent events while those during REM tend to incorporate much older memories,” says Cunningham. So you might get a bizarre memory cocktail in your dreams. Your childhood crush seated in the next cubicle at your office or it could be about you forgetting to prepare for your school exams long after you enter retired life.

Bulkeley believes that we are truly living in a golden era of dream research. “The study of long-term dream journals holds special promise as they can give a uniquely detailed view of the natural rhythms of dreaming in an actual human life,” he says. “We are just now learning how to combine long-term dream journals with the powers of modern data science. I believe the most important new findings in future dream research will come from this direction.”

Tech-savvy dreamers can soon control their dreams using an app. Horowitz’s company DUST, a spinoff from the MIT Media Lab, is building an app that will let users work with their own dreams for creativity, learning and healing. They are also working with clinicians and communities to explore applications in PTSD, chronic nightmares and mood. “The future I see for dream research is more collaboration between neuroscience, indigenous and historical dream traditions, clinical psychology and art,” he says, “DUST is a small piece in that larger shift: Giving people gentle, respectful interfaces to their own sleeping minds, and asking, ‘What do you want your dreams to do?’, instead of deciding for them.”

While mysteries around the purpose of dreaming continue, long-term dream journals and futuristic technology might unlock patterns we have never seen. Or, maybe the answers aren’t in waking life at all. Perhaps, we should sleep on it and see if our dreams can find the answer. So go ahead and let your neurons brainstorm. Lights off, please!