Creative “Dreams” May Occur When Awake; Creativity Often Comes From a “Committee” (Alternate Personalities), Not the Regular (Host) Personality

“Stephen King says, ‘Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake.’ He describes being completely caught up in a fictional world as he types, and unaware of real objects and events around him. Author James Hall agrees: ‘I don’t see that the dream state that we have at night is that much different from the dream state that writers learn to put themselves into as they’re writing’” (1, pp. 188-189).

John Steinbeck wrote, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it” (1, p. ix).

Robert Louis Stevenson goes on to speculate on the nature of the Committee: “Who are they then? My Brownies, who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego…—I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all…so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share…I am an excellent advisor, I pull back and cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I held the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table which is the worst of it” (1, pp. 64-65).

1. Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—and How You Can Too. New York, Crown Publishers, 2001.