Wondering how to use your dreams to improve your life? Here’s how…
Your nighttime dreams offer gifts that you can use into the new year.
Key points
- We often think of creativity as the domain of artists and geniuses. In reality, every one of us is creative.
- Some of our most creative ideas can be generated from our nighttime dreams.
- Writing down your dreams can spark associations that further creative inquiry.
With the holiday season upon us, you may be wondering about your own creativity, or perceived lack of it. The neighbor who makes the gorgeous decorative wreaths that put our store-bought gift to shame, or the chef who creates the festive meal for twenty people while we struggle simply to reheat and serve—surely these people have more creativity than we do.
Think again.
Read More Here: Why Do Some People Always Remember Their Dreams?
From decades of working with clients using nighttime dreams to develop their creativity, I can reassure you: You are far more creative than you think. In remembering even snippets of a nighttime dream, one can find many imaginative ideas for everything from art and music to solutions to daytime challenges. If you start a dream practice, taking time daily to write down these nighttime dreams and review them later, you’ll begin to appreciate a whole level of creativity within yourself that can be used in waking life.
Forget Picasso and Start With You
When we talk about creativity, names like Picasso, Mozart, or even Taylor Swift come up for my clients in our discussions. After all, it is geniuses like these who populate our schoolbooks and concert halls, becoming synonymous with creativity for most of us. Indeed, their talents are categorized as what researchers Ruth Richards and Marc Runco call “Big C Creativity.”
However, everyday creativity—what these researchers refer to as “little c“—is something all of us demonstrate in small moments, often completely unaware that we are dipping into our creative processes. This everyday creativity shows up in decision making, problem solving, social interactions, and while doing business.
In other words, while John Legend works on his next album, you are also using creativity to come up with a smart idea for your school’s fundraising committee, or deftly steering a social conversation from potential conflict back to a friendly chat. When it comes to creativity, you don’t have to be a household name to have it—and use it—daily.
But Picasso et al. isn’t the only block for most people in appreciating and developing their own creativity. While we may compare ourselves to creative greats, shrinking our own self-perception in the process, the real problem comes when we don’t believe we have the ability to manifest creative ideas when they come to us. Many people don’t notice their own intuitive thoughts, let alone recall the nighttime dreams that can present daily solutions to waking challenges.
In order to get in touch with these useful experiences and leverage your own creativity, here are three ways you can learn to pay attention to this vital conduit to the inner self. In doing so, you’ll discover the creativity you already have—and how to use it to make things happen.
Write Down Your Dreams
Outside the worlds of art, music, and entertainment, creativity often gets a bad rap in our productivity and efficiency-focused society. When the most important values center on how much and how fast, it’s hard to square allotting time to making bracelets or finger-painting with anything else. But consider the World Economic Forum’s 2024 jobs forecast that lists creativity as the second most sought-after skill for future jobs in the next decade.
Whether you’re a bracelet maker or a manufacturing CEO, dreaming has long been equated with innovation. It connects us with the ideas we might otherwise miss. Without someone remembering a nighttime dream, the sewing machine would not have been invented, the Rolling Stones wouldn’t be known for “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and the Twilight book series never would have been written.
But you don’t need to be dreaming of material for a hit record to connect with your creative resources. Each night, all of us slip into an unedited world of imagination where the known events of our daytime experiences are combined in all kinds of new ways.
Neurologically, dreaming and imagination both come from the default neural network. By recording your dreams and looking at them later, you are taking advantage of the work your brain is already doing.
Prioritize Sleep: It’s Your Idea Factory!
Think about your daily life. For most of us, it’s a high-speed race from the sound of the alarm in the morning to when we hit the pillow by evening. Free time, if we have any, is crammed with errands, distractions, or doom scrolling. There’s little opportunity to consider, let alone to cultivate, creative ideas.
Sleep is the great equalizer. Sleep, if you allow for some, is truly time out of our daytime mind. In sleeping, we are placed in front of our own inner visual screen and the images generated by our dreams. It’s like a free class in ideas, every single night.
So make time for sleep. Along with restoring and repairing our bodies, sleep allows our minds to explore the challenges of daily life and find ways to rise above them.
Keep the Weird!
When working on a project by ourselves, or especially while in a group, we tend to edit our ideas, rejecting the most outlandish of them. However, often it is the most outlandish ideas that create the perfect solution. After all, the O-shape of the Benzene Ring came from a dreamlike vision of a snake eating its tail.
Honor these seemingly crazy thoughts and scenarios. When we get a dream journal and begin to capture these strange images and ideas, we don’t just find new ways of looking at things. We also spark our innate, creative ingenuity to move beyond an expected solution.
We can use our dreams to follow the unconscious down a path of potentially useful associations. The more curious we get about these, the more they can spark even more important or relevant ideas.
Read More Here: 5 Key Mindset Shifts To Make Your Dreams Come True
You Have the Solutions
Creativity is not a stagnant phenomenon, nor is it a skill limited to a lucky few. It is within all of us, an inherent part of our human condition.
Take the time to discover what your own dreams are saying to you. Whether you’re a famous painter or simply trying to figure out how to handle a difficult holiday relative, you can rely upon your own creativity to solve the problem or see it in a new way. While you may never enjoy cooking a meal for 20 people, dreamwork will allow you to identify and pursue those ideas that are most important to you.
References
Fine, P.A., Danek, A.H., Friedlander, K.J., Hocking, I., & Thompson, W.F. (2019) Editorial: Novel approaches for studying creativity in problem-solving and artistic performance. Frontiers in Psychology 10, Article 2059.
Richards, R. (2007) Everyday creativity: Our hidden potential. In Richards, R.(Ed.) Everyday creativity and new views of human nature: Psychological, social, and spiritual perspectives (pp. 25—53). American Psychological Association. Washington DC
“World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report,” accessed January 2024, at https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs- report-2023/digest/.
Written by Bonnie Buckner Ph.D.
This article originally appeared on Psychologytoday.com on November 19, 2025.
Reprinted by permission.
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