Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance
Scientific Reports May 15, 2023 Adam Haar Horowitz, Kathleen Esfahany, Tomás Vega Galvez et al. 31 citations
Sleep onset (N1 sleep) enhances creative performance more than wakefulness, and successfully incubating a specific theme into N1 dreams further boosts creativity. Participants who received auditory cues during sleep onset to introduce a theme showed greater semantic distance and better performance on theme-related creativity tasks compared to those who remained awake. This provides the first controlled evidence that dream content itself, not just N1 sleep, contributes to creative enhancement, supporting N1 as a cognitive state with heightened associative divergence.