Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Image: Art Furnace/Shutterstock via Nautilus.

As a longtime proponent of naps, I try to share every new angle I read about them. Today’s article is on narcolepsy, which is not something you want, but it does show how creative work may go on when you’re asleep.

Kristen French writes at Nautilus, “George Church looks like he needs a nap. I’m talking to him on Zoom, and his eyelids have grown heavy, inclining toward slumber. Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. He assures me he is wide awake. But sleeping and waking life are often blurred for Church. One of the world’s most imaginative scientists, Church is a narcoleptic.

“A rare disorder, narcolepsy causes sudden attacks of sleep, and Church has fallen asleep in some unfortunate circumstances — at The World Economic Forum, just a few feet away from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for instance. He also had to give up driving due to the risk that a bout of sleepiness will strike while he is behind the wheel. But Church, a Harvard geneticist known for his pathbreaking contributions to numerous fields — from genetics to astrobiology to biomedicine—says the benefits of his condition outweigh the inconveniences. Many of his wildest and most prescient ideas come from his narcoleptic naps.

“ ‘The fact is, I fall asleep several times a day, and so almost everything comes from there,’ Church says. His idea for a quick and simple way to ‘read’ DNA — which resulted in the first commercial genome sequence, of the human pathogen H. pylori — came from a narcoleptic nap.

“He also conceived of editing genomes with a method analogous to CRISPR, and building new genomes with off-the-shelf molecules, during narcoleptic naps. More recently, in December, a wild idea for a space probe that could reach distant stars within just 20 years, at one-fifth the speed of light, came to him after a narcoleptic nap. He proposed that these lightning-speed interstellar missions could be launched by microbes and powered by laser sails. The ideas that come to him are often the result of collisions of unexpected images in his head. ‘I try to turn science fiction into science fact,’ Church tells me.

“The relationship between sleep, dreaming, and creativity has been the subject of conjecture for hundreds of years. Reports of creative inspiration and discoveries made by artists, inventors, and scientists while dreaming suggest these states of mind are intimately bound together. The symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux was known to guard his sleep at night with a sign on his bedroom door that read ‘Do not disturb: Poet at work.’ Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeleev reportedly had a vision of the periodic table in a dream after three days of exhaustive effort (though it may have just been the perfection of an idea he had while awake). Stephen King claims he dreamt up his novel Misery during a somnolent transatlantic flight.

“Rather than leave such inspirations to chance, American inventor Thomas Edison designed a strategy for mining his dreams for material. He would doze off with a steel ball in each hand. Once his body went limp with sleep, the balls would drop to the floor with a clatter and wake him up. He could then recall details of his dreams and record any insights. …

“Scientific studies seem to validate these tales. Study participants asked to ‘incubate’ a problem in their dreams often come up with a useful solution, and both the frequency and complexity of one’s dream recall have been correlated with higher scores on creativity evaluations. 

“The stage of sleep most closely associated with creative inspiration is known as REM, short for rapid eye movement. REM sleep begins about 70 minutes after a person loses consciousness and is rich with dream life. Lucid dreams, in which the dreamer knows he or she is dreaming and can sometimes direct the dream, are thought to primarily occur in REM. Waking from REM sleep has been shown to improve study subjects’ ability to solve anagrams. …

“But researchers have recently identified another state of mind that lies in the transition between waking and sleeping and may be even more fertile for creative inspiration than REM. It is called N1 or sleep onset, and it is the first of three stages in pre-REM sleep.

People with narcolepsy frequently fall into and out of N1 during daytime naps, giving them much greater access to these borderland perceptual states than normal sleepers.

“N1 is a hybrid, or ‘semilucid’ state of mind, says French neuroscientist Celia Lacaux, when individuals are just beginning to detach from the waking environment. It is a mental twilight that allows one to ‘freely watch the mind wander while maintaining a logical ability to identify creative sparks,’ says Lacaux. This shadowy frontier between waking and dreaming, to which all sleepers have access, may be the source of many of humanity’s most novel ideas, inventions, and works of art. Psychologists call it ‘hypnagogia,’ after the Greek words for ‘sleep’ (hypnos) and ‘to lead’ (agogo). The French sometimes refer to it as ‘entre chien et loup,’ literally ‘between dog and wolf.’ …

“ ‘Hypnagogia happens to be a time period where you are much more subject to outside influence and where you’re doing much more auditory processing and where your dream recall rates are much higher,’ says Adam Haar, a dream researcher at MIT Media Lab. It is characterized by phenomenological unpredictability, distorted perception of space and time, and spontaneous, fluid idea association.

“A relationship between hypnagogia and creativity makes intuitive sense. One major theory of creativity posits that it results when our minds make connections between distantly related concepts stored in our memories. This is a process that is thought to occur naturally during sleeping and dreaming: New memories mingle in novel and abstract ways with older ones as a means of consolidating them, laying down tracks in our brains for later recollection. Neuroscientist Karl Friston, who studies consciousness, proposes that this mashing together of old and new is a process that helps to minimize redundancy and complexity in our memory system, and prepares us to navigate a fuller range of possible scenarios in our waking lives.”

More at Nautilus, here. No firewall.

I know that when I wrote theater reviews, they came out better for weekly papers than dailies because I had a chance to “sleep on it.”

And then there’s the famous story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge composing “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced sleep. (Not recommending the opium part.)