Dreamers are an untapped business resource

This is the seventh post in my Too Hot To Publish series. And it’s a look at a state that’s considered to hold no value for businesses: dreaminess. 

I believe there’s a reason why people phase out and daydream at work. And it’s that their work is utterly tedious and offers them little reward besides the paycheck. If their work doesn’t require any personal input or require even rudimentary thought, it’s no wonder employees become disengaged from it.

But dreaming - either daydreaming or nightdreaming - can be a valuable creative state, if we harness it. Which is one of the reasons why I’ll often fit a nap into my work day. Try not to drift off while you're reading. 

Dreamers are an untapped business resource

Some people just seem to have their head in the clouds. These people are generally seen as being pretty disengaged and therefore are passed-over for the important (and probably more engaging) jobs. They end up being given a workload of low-grade clerical drudgery that ensures they never get the chance to use their real abilities.

Maybe these individuals are more valuable than you think. Maybe if their butterfly minds were put to work on the right tasks, they'd deliver more value to the organisation.

Understanding our dreams

The psychologist, Carl Jung, was fascinated by dreams. He believed they were an insight into the unconscious brain and therefore worthy of study and interpretation. However, over the years, his approach has been adopted and twisted into a form of pseudo-spiritual woo-woo. The interpretation of dreams now has a scientific status on par with reading tea leaves and dowsing for ley lines.

The emerging neuroscientific take on the act of dreaming certainly removes any trace of fluffy mythology. The current view is that dreams are a side-effect of memory consolidation. During the day our experiences are stored in the hippocampus and at night these memories are transferred to our cerebral cortex. This involves replaying information in a way that activates our visual and prefrontal cortexes. And it appears to happen when we're in REM sleep, the level just below wakefulness. If we wake while the process is happening, we stitch the stimulus into a dream narrative.

This doesn't necessarily take the magic out of dreams. In fact, it shows us that dreaming can be a pretty useful tool for creative thinking.

The genius of the dreaming mind

Much of Salvador Dali's unworldly surrealism was inspired by his dreams. So much so that he referred to many of his paintings as 'dream photographs'.

The most covered song of all time, The Beatle's Yesterday, apparently came to Paul McCartney in a dream. The story goes that he woke up with the full melody in his head and immediately went to his piano to work out the chords. Over the next few weeks, he played it to lots of people to see if they recognised it because it had felt so familiar to him. After no one could place it, he decided it must belong to him after all.

Apparently, the breakthrough that led to a working sewing machine was invented in a dream, too. In 1845, Elias Howe was struggling to get his idea to work until he had a gruesome dream of being murdered by cannibals. As they were dancing around the fire preparing to cook him, Elias noticed that there was a little hole near the tip of each spear. This caused him to shift his thinking from the hole being at the reverse end of the needle to placing it near the tip. And with this breakthrough the sewing machine was possible.

Not everyone has genius ideas like these in their slumber. Even those who keep a notepad by their bed in case of a stroke of somnambulant genius will tell you that most of what they scribble down in the dark turns out to be useless.

But there are things you can do to increase your nocturnal strike rate.

Using dreams as a thinking tool

Balder Onarheim is the founder of the Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity. In a TEDx talk he delivered in 2015 he outlined exactly how you can use dreams to help you come up with ideas that break out of your normalised thinking.

He explains that our sleep happens in 90-minute cycles, taking you through deeper sleep states before bringing you back to the lighter REM state where dreams can happen. These dreams, as you'll already have experienced, don't follow the normal rules of the physical world and don't restrict you to your typical behaviour. So, in other words, they cause you to diverge. And that's what makes dreaming so valuable.

To tap into this, Balder recommends that you prime your sleep with information about the problem you want to solve. Before you nod off, think about all the information relevant to your problem - but don't actually try to solve it. Then set an alarm to wake up in an increment of 90 minutes when you're most likely to be in a dream state. As soon as you wake up, note down whatever you were thinking about. It may not actually solve your problem but it's likely to give you some fresh thoughts and perspectives on it at least.

From night dreams to daydreams

As we've mentioned previously, Einstein was a great fan of using daydreams to explore concepts. But he wasn't the only scientist to benefit from this approach.

August Kekule may never have made his breakthrough with the structure of the Benzene molecule if it wasn't for a bit of daydreaming. As an organic chemist, he was used to thinking of molecules as being long chains of connected elements, linked together by strings of carbon bonds. But the benzene molecule didn't seem to fit in with this approach. He was stumped. Until he let his mind wander in a spot of daytime reverie. In his vision, he saw a snake bite its own tail, turning itself into a circle. This led to his breakthrough where he discovered that benzene was, in fact, a ring rather than a chain.

From experience, it's very often when you take a break from a problem that the best answers come to you. During my talks and workshops, I often ask people when they get these 'aha!' moments. And the answers are usually the same: before I go to bed, when I wake up, in the shower, on the toilet, on the bus or when I'm driving a car.

And there's neuroscience that explains why this is.

The power of chilling out

The technical term for an 'aha!' kind of mental breakthrough is an 'Insight Solution'. It's characterised by the idea striking us suddenly, often accompanied by a strong emotional response. Potentially enough for you to run down the street naked shouting "Eureka!" at the top of your lungs.

It's not a necessary step of any problem-solving process. But it feels fantastic when you have one. And neuroscientists appear to have isolated the exact part of your brain that's responsible for this kind of thinking.

Test subjects were given problems to solve while wired up to an EEG or placed inside an fMRI scanner. If they successfully solved the problem, the subjects indicated whether the solution came to them in a moment of insight or in some other way. It was found that insight solutions corresponded with a burst of gamma activity in a region just above the right ear, called the Anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus. It seemed to be a moment where knowledge was being transferred from the unconscious to the conscious parts of the brain. And, interestingly, the activity only seemed to happen after a period of alpha activity. This is the brain frequency that's associated with relaxation. It's an idling state where certain areas of the brain have inhibited activity, including the visual cortex.

It's what happens to our brains when we daydream.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop thinking about it, take some deep breaths and let your mind wander. 

Sweet dreams. 

Zzzzzzzzzzzz...

If you enjoyed this piece, it's probably worth picking up the book it didn’t make it into. You can get it right here on your local Amazon. And maybe think about working with me to help your business get better ideas. I do talks and workshops on all of this stuff and work with companies to help them benefit from better ideas.

As you may have noticed, this is part 7 in the series, You can find the other ‘Too Hot’ articles right here, if you're interested:

Diversity - Sheesh! Can we stop talking about diversity now?

Trauma - How to benefit from trauma tearing you in two

Upbringing - How not to be brought down by the way you’re brought up

Illness - The way business views illness is sick

Altered States - Should we consider using drugs in the workplace?

Contrarianism - The simple guide to being a contrarian

If you like what I've written here, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Just include a message saying that you've read this article.