Paul McCartney (1942–, a British singer) created the famous song "Let It Be" after drawing inspiration from a dream. McCartney described the experience at the time as follows.
"One day I dreamed of my mother, who had passed away more than 10 years earlier. Amazingly, my mother eased my anxiety. In the dream, she said, 'It will be all right.' I don't remember exactly whether my mother actually used the words 'Let it be,' but the core of her advice was, 'Don't worry too much. Everything will be all right.' So I came to write this song. The song begins with the phrases 'When I find myself in times of trouble' and 'Mother Mary comes to me.' At the time, I was actually in a difficult situation. Mary is my mother's name. This song was created based on that dream."
Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was a Russian-born French Expressionist painter. One day, he had the following dream.
"Suddenly the ceiling opened, and a winged being descended, instantly filling the room with sound and roaring, movement and painting. I heard the slow beating of wings. I thought, 'It's an angel!' I didn't dare open my eyes. It was too bright and dazzling. After illuminating every corner, it flew up through the hole in the ceiling."
Chagall drew inspiration from this dream and completed "Apparition" (1917). For Chagall, the angel was the goddess of creation and a symbol of divine inspiration.
In 1998, Larry Page (1973–), the co-founder of Google, also gained inspiration for Google's search engine from a dream.
"When I was 23, I had a dream. I suddenly woke up and thought, what if I could download the entire web and keep just the links? I immediately grabbed a pen and started writing. Amazingly, at the time I had no intention of building a search engine at all. It wasn't something I even considered. But much later, we stumbled upon a better way to rank web pages to build a great search engine, and as a result, Google was born. If you have a really good dream, be sure to hold on to it."
According to research on creativity, the process of invention and creation generally goes through four stages. The first is the immersion stage, in which one deeply studies a single subject. The second is the stage of accumulating abundant material and experience related to the subject. The third is the moment of inspiration, the so-called "Eureka." The fourth is the stage of evaluating and verifying the idea.
Among these, the third stage—the moment of inspiration—cannot be forced. To reach this stage, one needs to step away for a while from the work one has been absorbed in, and take a walk, go swimming, take a nap, or get enough rest.
Russian physicist Arkady Migdal described creativity as "the middle ground where the conscious and the unconscious meet." This means that conscious reason operates even during sleep, and subconscious work continues even while awake.
The artist Salvador Dalí and the inventor Thomas Edison knew that the drowsy period just before falling asleep could maximize creativity. When they napped in a chair, they would hold an object in their hand, and would wake up at the sound of the object dropping.
This is because during the hypnagogia stage, when sleep is just beginning, there is a high likelihood of having creative dreams. Dalí described many of his surrealist works as "hand-painted dream photographs." For him, dreams were the source of countless works.
What happens in the brain at this time? Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize for research in neurophysiology, explained it as follows.
"Special aspects of creativity appear likely to be generated in the association areas of the cerebral cortex. There are intriguing research findings that the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, particularly the right anterior superior temporal gyrus and the right parietal lobe, is involved in creativity."
In summary, during the light sleep stage, the activity of the frontal lobe, which oversees logical thinking, decreases. Instead, the association areas that freely mix fragmented memories and concepts to create surreal combinations become activated. In this process, creative ideas emerge, and sometimes they can be seen appearing in the form of dreams.
