Visiting the land of dream muses: The relationship between lucid dreaming and creativity

Abstract

Dreaming is a very creative state of mind. Lucid dreamers – who can become aware in their dreams that they are dreaming – have an advantage of directly tapping into the creative potentials of the dreaming mind. This study explored the relationship between lucid dreaming and creativity. Twenty lucid dreamers were asked to accomplish a creative generation task once in a lucid dream and once while awake. Their performance was compared to a control group of 20 non-lucid dreamers who did the task once (i.e. awake). While according to the present findings, the lucid dream state did not appear to be more advantageous for creativity than waking imagination, lucid dreamers performed better on a creative task than non-lucid dreamers, which supports the notion of existing relationship between the ability for lucid dreaming and creativity. Future studies should explore the directionality of this relationship and make further comparisons of creative performance in wakefulness and the lucid dream state.