Let’s say you have one of those tricky briefs to crack today. The pressure is on, the floor is covered in balls of screwed up paper and you can hear the twitch of an account handlers arse right outside your door.
In this kind of situation, take a tip from a few scientists. Instead of banging your head against a wall, go home, head for the bedroom, climb under the covers and go back to sleep. Because some of our most creative moments happen when we are having a deep REM nap.
Apparently REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, is when most dreams occur and this is the time when we are better able to come up with original thinking.
In fact, a study at the University of California San Diego says that volunteers who entered REM during sleep, improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.
When you sleep your mind does not turn off; quite the contrary, it becomes very active during dreaming. Through dreams, your mind
Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm
continues to work out solutions and tackle problems and taps into your innate creativity and problem solving skills.
The old saying “to sleep on it” is a perfect example. Sleep is a powerful problem-solving tool and you can be flat out in the land of nod and still come up with a work of genius. Take the song ‘Yesterday’ for example. When The Beatles were in London in 1965 filming Help! McCartney was staying in a small attic room in a house on Wimpole Street.
One morning, in a dream he heard a classical string ensemble playing, and, as McCartney tells it: “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th — and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it.”This creative surge happens more often than you imagine. Stephen King often gets ideas for his books from dreams. Golfer Jack Nicklaus credits an improvement to his game from a dream that showed a new way to hold his golf club. And back in the 70’s copywriter Terry Lovelock was awoken from a dream and scribbled ‘Heineken Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ on a sheet of paper next to his bed.
Psychology professor Richard Wiseman, say’s. “In our dreams we produce unusual combinations of ideas that can seem surreal, but every once in a while result in an amazingly creative solution to an important problem”. Professor Wiseman also stressed that the findings reveal the ease with which ideas are produced, but called on bosses to alter working habits to aid creativity.
“Ideas can come to people at any time and in any place, but to fully reap the rewards of a creative mind people’s brains need to be primed for a new way of thinking”, he said. “Britain’s bosses must therefore foster new approaches if they want to get the most out of their employees.”
John Fountain is tucked up with a nice cup of Horlicks.
