Are You Most Creative Just Before You Fall Asleep?

Exploring the intriguing science of "hypnagogia."

Paul Seli, PhD, is falling asleep. As he nods off, a sleep-tracking glove called Dormio, developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detects his nascent sleep state and jars him awake. Pulled back from the brink, he jots down the artistic ideas that came to him during those semilucid moments.

Seli is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and also an artist. He uses Dormio to tap into the world of hypnagogia, the transitional state that exists at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep.

In a mini-experiment, he created a series of paintings inspired by ideas plucked from his hypnagogic state and another series from ideas that came to him during waking hours. Then he asked friends to rate how creative the paintings were, without telling them which were which. They judged the hypnagogic paintings as significantly more creative.

“In dream states, we seem to be able to link things together that we normally wouldn’t connect,” Seli said. “It’s like there’s an artist in my brain that I get to know through hypnagogia.”—Kirsten Weir, Monitor on Psychology

It’s said that inventor Thomas Edison would allow himself to fall asleep in his chair while holding steel ball bearings in his hands; as he relaxed into slumber, the ball bearings would slip out of his grasp and bang loudly on the floor. Startled awake, he would jot down any thoughts that had come to him in this twilight state.

A study by researchers at the Sorbonne in Paris, published in the journal Science Advances in 2021, tested the creativity-boosting effects of such “nonrapid eye movement sleep,” a stage known as N1.

Participants in the study were exposed to mathematical problems without knowing that a hidden rule allowed the problems to be solved almost instantly. The researchers found that spending at least 15 seconds in N1 during a resting period tripled the chance to discover the hidden rule: 83% of the N1 sleepers discovered rhe rule, as compared to 30% of those who remained awake. The effect vanished if subjects reached deeper sleep.

The researchers concluded: “Our findings suggest that there is a creative sweet spot within the sleep-onset period, and hitting it requires individuals balancing falling asleep easily against falling asleep too deeply.”

Keeping a notebook next to your bed—or the sofa where you take naps!—is an easy way to take advantage of this kind of twilight creativity. As you fall asleep, you could try holding an object in your hand (the Sorbonne researchers did this with their study participants), or you could set a gentle alarm to go off after 15 or 20 minutes. Before reaching full alertness, grab your notebook and jot down any thoughts or ideas that have stirred in your mind. Or you could voice-dictate into your phone while keeping your eyes closed.

Give it a try—and please share the results!