Why might your dreams often seem as though they were produced by a brain that’s far more intelligent, creative, and humorous than your own?

From our earliest beginnings, we humans have been mystified by our dreams, investing considerable effort into interpreting their meaning and their purpose. A dream’s clandestine existence below our level of consciousness, engages us during sleep and then melts away like a snowflake when we awake and attempt to recover it. The Poincaré-Hadamard  model for discovery suggests that during sleep, our brain attempts to organize all the fragments of perception gathered during consciousness and organize them into meaningful relationships. This period of incubation often climaxes in illumination that is fast and frugal, and manifests as a eureka! moment. The final stage, consolidation, invokes what Kahneman and Tversky referred to as the System 2 type of slow arduous checking on this intuitive “aha!”. Throughout this entire discovery process, the System 1 (visceral) and 2 (rational) modes of thinking conjoin in transforming the dream into a discovery. 

There are numerous testimonials from those in the natural sciences, attesting to this subconscious transformation of dreams into discoveries. However, the function of the subconscious permeates all areas of human endeavor that have a creative component. The great playwrights and novelists agonize over their works, ruminating in a reflective mode for long periods as they attempt to conceptualize the relationships and personality attributes of their fictional characters. Their ideas incubate during sleep and often manifest in dreams that become their revelation when they awake. 

The inspiration for his classic thriller, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson during an opium induced nightmare. While in the throes of this drama, his terrified screams woke his wife Fanny who ran to his aid. Startled, he inquired, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” Describing the circumstances preceding his nocturnal hallucinations, he said:

For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.” 

The next morning, the inspired author began a writing spree that spanned a period of 6 days and yielded a draft of 64,000 words. His dream-inspired novel, published in 1886, brought him international recognition, and over a century later was the inspiration for the movie Limitless.

Author Stephen King revealed in a 2003 interview that he had been visited by vivid dreams while recovering from injuries received when a minivan careened into him as he walked down a country road:

The first really strong idea that occurred to me after the accident was: four guys in a cabin in the woods. Then you introduce this one guy who staggers into camp saying, “I don’t feel well,” and he brings this awful hitchhiker with him. I dreamed a lot about that cabin and those guys in it.

Those dreams were the inspiration for Stephen King’s 2001 horror novel Dreamcatcher that became a movie in 2003. 

Even in the music world, dreams play a prominent role. The music for the famous hit song Yesterday came to Paul McCartney in a dream, so vivid that he thought he must have heard it while conscious:

I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune – or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.’

The creative people in the arts and sciences are imbued with a reflective habit of mind, spending large portions of their time immersed in the joy of exploration and discovery. They are, indeed, dopamine junkies, but their fix comes from those eureka! moments that culminate in a discovery, a great poem, a riveting novel, or a work of art.  In his book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness down to Size, author Tor Nørretranders argues that our conscious mind, the one of which we are aware, is only the tip of our mental machinery, most of which operates unobserved by our unconscious mind.