Dalí’s creative dream: Scientific evidence demonstrates the power of micro-naps

In the pages of his book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, originally published by New York’s Dial Press in 1948, the Catalan artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1981) made reference to one of the most curious techniques of his artistic practice, which he described as the “sleep with a key” method. It had to do with the micro-naps he often took during the day. During these, he would sit upright in an armchair holding a heavy metal key in one hand. Below that hand, he would place an upside-down metal plate. The idea was that shortly after he fell asleep, the key would fall from his hand, hit the plate and wake him up with a clang — a primitive alarm clock. According to Dalí, these brief naps revitalized him both physically and psychologically, spurring his creativity.

The scientist Thomas A. Edison had a similar habit. The U.S. inventor’s aversion to sleep was well-known. In fact, he loved to say that he never slept more than four hours a night because he considered slumber to be a waste of time. However, during the day, he took micro-naps while clutching an iron ball in each hand. Just like Dalí, he placed a pan underneath each sphere, so that the sound of them falling would wake him. These naps were an important source of his creativity. Science has long since dismantled Edison’s maxim that sleep is just a waste of time; indeed, it has been proven to be one of the most important pillars of health. But that same science seems to increasingly favor the inventor’s and Dalí’s assertion that micro-naps serve as a driver of creativity, and can facilitate problem-solving.

“Sleep promotes creativity in two particularly important ways,” says Juan Antonio Madrid, a professor of physiology at the University of Murcia. In the first place, during paradoxical or REM sleep, “vivid, sometimes hallucinatory” dreams can occur which often, if an effort is made to remember them, “can be the basis for writing a movie script, designing the scene of a painting, or for any other creative endeavor.”

According to Madrid, the human brain has a certain way of functioning during alert states: it frequently uses the same circuits, which leads to more structured forms of thinking and reasoning. But in the REM stage, that structure is dismantled, prefrontal areas of the brain are deactivated, and connections are made between areas of the brain that do not normally connect with each other. “These dreams are so vivid that it seems certain mystical experiences or visions that later become part of religions or narratives in different cultures could have appeared in the REM sleep of people, who believed them to be real,” he adds.

The second important connection, which also happens to confirm Dalí and Edison’s intuition, happens during the initial phase of sleep, which is known as N1. This is a short (five to 10 minutes) transitional phase of light sleep, halfway between wakefulness and real slumber, during which we may think we are still awake because we continue to hear things around us, though in reality we are beginning to be embraced by Morpheus. “The phase has almost never been assigned any importance. However, it includes a very important function, which is that greater cognitive flexibility appears, meaning that your brain begins to function differently. It had always been thought that no dreams take place during N1 sleep, but that’s not true. Dreams do occur, and they include thoughts that follow a particular logic that is different from that of one’s typical thoughts, and can open the door to creativity,” says the author of Cronobiología: una guía para descubrir tu reloj biológico (Cronobiology: a guide to discovering your biological clock; Plataforma Editorial, 2022).

Scientific findings

Delphine Oudiette has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and has been a researcher at the Paris Brain Institute since 2018. One of her obsessions has been creative micro-naps. In 2021, she published the results of a study in Science Advances that was inspired by Dalí’s theory and looked to test the effect of the beginning of sleep (the N1 phase) on creativity. To do so, they presented study participants with a creative problem and divided them into three groups. Participants in the first group took a Dalí-style nap (using a bottle in place of iron balls), the second group took a longer nap, and the third group weren’t given the chance to sleep. The result was that members of the first group had an 83% chance of solving the assignment’s puzzle. That percentage dropped to 30% when participants remained awake, but the beneficial effect of the nap completely disappeared when participants from the second group reached deeper phases of sleep.

“We observed a slowdown in brain activity just before the objects were dropped. Their fall prevented participants from moving into phase N2. However, we also observed that, on occasion, participants dropped the bottle even before reaching phase N1. These premature drops suggest that this technique is sensitive to the first signs of drowsiness and that, therefore, it could sometimes prevent participants from reaching the creative zone. In other words, dozing off with an object in your hand is effective for maintaining optimal creativity, but only if you manage to reach phase N1 of sleep,” she explains to EL PAÍS.

What happens in the brain at this moment that could explain the burst of creativity remains a mystery. Oudiette’s hypothesis is that the N1 phase offers an ideal setting for creativity because it is a semi-lucid state that combines elements of both wakefulness and sleep. “On the one hand, we begin to disconnect from our surroundings, lose control over our thoughts, and experience intense mental experiences. All of these are characteristics of spontaneous thinking, which favors the creation of associations between different concepts and, in general, helps generate creative ideas,” she says.

On the other hand, according to the researcher, during this period, we are not completely unconscious and can still monitor our thoughts in some way. “This could help us evaluate our ideas, recognize when we have a creative breakthrough, and remember it when we wake up right afterwards.”

Could this technique be applied to solve everyday problems, the situations that become so entrenched in our lives that we can’t seem to find our way out of them? Juan Antonio Madrid has no doubt this could be the case. “It’s my own personal observation, but my feeling is that these naps can also help us solve personal dilemmas, in the same way that they can help solve mathematical and creative problems,” he says. Delphine Oudiette is more cautious in her answer. “It’s too early to say,” she remarks. “The task we set in the study is not similar to the type of complex problems we want to solve in real life. In any case, in the meantime, there’s no harm in trying!”

Incubating dreams

In a review published in 2024 by Trends in Neuroscience by Oudiette and her team that compiles all scientific evidence available in the field to date, researchers describe the N1 phase of sleep as a “creative sweet spot.” “Several recent studies support the idea that the borderland of sleep is conducive to creative sparks,” states the article.

Those sparks can also be encouraged by incubating dreams. “N1 sleep has another characteristic, which is that it can be conditioned or directed more easily than REM sleep,” says Madrid. This conditioning, he explains, begins before the nap by thinking, reading or listening to audio on the topic in question, be it a mathematical problem, a story whose next step has been lost to writer’s block, or a work of art that is not progressing. Then, during the transition to sleep in the N1 phase, external stimuli can be used to evoke images through very simple words that recall its concept or central problem. “This greatly increases creativity and leads to ideas that can be revolutionary,” says Madrid.

Another study that was published in Scientific Reports in 2023 corroborates this hypothesis. Led by researchers from MIT, the project once again demonstrates better performance on three creative assignments after N1 sleep. But this study went a step further by incubating dreams through the use of a device that, when it detects that a person has entered the N1 phase, instructs them to think about a specific topic.

Participants in this study were divided into four groups. In the first group, as they entered the N1 phase, the device instructed to think about a tree. In the second group, when participants entered the N1 phase, the device merely asked them to observe their thoughts. The third and fourth groups remained awake, and were engaged in a mental guidance process. Those in the third group were instructed to think about a tree. Those in the fourth group were instructed to observe their thoughts. Upon awakening, more than 70% of the people in the incubation nap group reported dreaming about trees, compared to only 1.4% of the awake group, seemingly straightforward results. Members of the four groups were then given three scientifically validated creativity tests (the Creative Storytelling Task, the Alternative Uses Task and the Verb Generation Task).

On every task, the nap with incubation group scored significantly higher. The participants who took a micro-nap with dream incubation displayed 43% more creativity than those who took naps without incubation, and 78% more creativity than those who stayed awake.

“When you are prompted to think about a topic during sleep onset, you may have dream experiences that you can later use for creative tasks,” Kathleen Esfahany, one of the primary authors of the study, said in a press statement. In the study’s conclusion, researchers say that the results obtained back up the hypothesis that N1 allows for “a cognitive state with greater associative divergence,” “facilitating the exploration and capture of remotely associated concepts,” “and may be a potential mechanism for promoting creative insight.”

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