Creative Dreaming and Problem Solving

Few dreams are, by themselves, problem solving or creative. The few exceptions are usually very clear. Also, when they occur, the problem solving can apply to a wide range of human experience. For instance the problem might be personal or psychological, it might be a mathematical problem, or insight that produced a creative idea, thus solving a problem to do with questions being asked or something being attempted. These first two examples illustrate how a dream can resolve a psychological problem.

Example: ‘My mother in law died of cancer. I had watched the whole progression of her illness, and was very upset by her death. Shortly after she died the relatives gathered and began to sort through her belongings to share them out. That was the climax of my upset and distress, and I didn’t want any part of this sorting and taking her things. That night I dreamt I was in a room with all the relatives. They were sorting her things, and I felt my waking distress. Then my mother in law came into the room. She was very real and seemed happy. She said for me not to be upset as she didn’t at all mind her relatives taking her things. When I woke from the dream all the anxiety and upset had disappeared. It never returned.’ Told to author during a talk given to The Housewives Register in Ilfracombe.

Example: I was lying in my bed and a man was beside me. Gradually he got older and older until he was dead. Then he became a skeleton in bed beside me. I felt horrible. When I woke there was still some difficult feelings but these went. I realised that things, emotions, troubling me for ages had all been cleared. Previously at church the vicar had talked about the healing of forgiveness, and in some way this had happened while I was dreaming. Now, quite a time after the dream I am still in the state of ease. Stephanie – Chester

Although in any collection of dreams such clear cut problem solving is fairly rare, nevertheless, the basic function in dreams appears to be problem solving. The proof of this lies in research done in dream withdrawal. As explained in the entry science sleep and dreams, subjects are woke as they begin to dream, therefore denying them dreams. This quickly leads to disorientation and breakdown of normal functioning. Therefore, a lot of problem solving is occurring in dreams even though it may not be as obvious as the example. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/seeing-under-the-surface/

This feature of dreaming can be enhanced to a marked degree by processing dreams and arriving at insights into the information they contain. This enables old problems to be cleared and new information and attitudes to be brought into use more quickly.

Through such active work one becomes aware of the Self, which Carl Jung describes as a centre, but we might think of as a synthesis of all our experience and being. Gaining insight and allowing the Self entrance into our waking affairs, as M. L. Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols, gradually produces ‘a wider and more mature personality’ which ‘emerges, and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others.’ This is of course a very subjective event, yet it has obvious practical results. The person arrives at a greater social connectivity through it, and this usually results in marked changes in the opportunities life presents them.

The function of dreams may well be described as an effort on the part of our life process, to support, augment and help mature waking consciousness. A study of dreams suggests that the creative forces which are behind the growth of our body, are also inextricably connected with psychological development. In fact, when the process of physical growth stops, the psychological growth continues. If this is thwarted in any way, it leads to frustration, physical tension, and psychosomatic, and eventually, physical illness. The integration of experience which dreams are always attempting, if successful, cannot help but lead to personal growth. But it is often frozen by the individual avoiding the ‘growing pains’, or the discomfort of breaking through old concepts and beliefs.

Where there is any attempt on the part of our conscious personality to cooperate with this, the creative aspect of dreaming emerges. In fact, anything we are deeply involved in, challenged by, or attempting, we will dream about in a creative way. Not only have communities like the American Indians used dreams in this manner – to find better hunting; solve community problems; find a sense of personal life direction – but scientists, writers, designers, and thousands of lay people have found very real information in dreams. After all, through dreams we have personal use of the greatest computer ever produced in the history of the world – the human brain.

1. In Genesis 41, the story of Pharaoh’s dream is told – the seven fat cows and the seven thin cows. This dream was creative in that with Joseph’s interpretation it resolved a national situation where famine followed years of plenty. It may very well

be an example of gathered information on the history of Egypt being in the mind of Pharaoh, and the dream putting it together in a problem solving way. See: the dream process as computer.

In the June 27, 1964, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, golfer Jack Nicklaus described how he had fallen into a bad slump. Despite intensive analysis of what could be wrong, he continued to do poorly. He then experienced a dream in which he was holding his golf club differently and swinging perfectly. He told the newspaper reporter, ‘When I came to the course yesterday morning, I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. … I feel kind of foolish admitting it, but it really happened in a dream.’ After the dream, his scores improved rapidly.

Dana Cushing, an acquaintance of mine from Boston, has made a hobby of riding old-fashioned, high-wheeled bicycles. After he bought his first one, he spent about three months repairing it. During this interval, Dana had several dreams in which he joyously rode this velocipede. He was surprised by this because he had never actually ridden one in his waking life. When the repairs were finished, Dana discovered that he was able to successfully ride his velocipede on his very first attempt. It seemed as if the ‘practice’ sessions in his dreams had enabled him to achieve waking mastery of the complicated balancing skills necessary for such a performance.

The visual imagery of dreams, particularly of nightmares, has also been captured in word pictures. Many authors have tried to describe the – From The Dreaming Mind.

Problem solving is a basic life skill we use every day. Most of the time you do it unconsciously, as you do when we look for mislaid keys, or wonder what clothes to wear to deal with today’s needs. But sometimes you may feel lost in confronting a situation, and need extra help. To do this you can learn to use your problem solving ability consciously to find a solution. Lorna, looking for the source of her frustration and tension describes what she found through exploring her dream as follows:

I am experiencing an enormous tension throughout my body. I am allowing the tension to wrack me and begin to see what is causing it. It seems to have developed in my childhood. I, like most youngsters, didn’t have it explained to me what the rules of the game of life were; what the social and biological expectations, regulations, drives and urges are and how to work with them. But we are supposed to get it RIGHT. If you do get this amazingly complex apparatus of life right, then the bells ring and you are rewarded. Then you climb the social and biological ladder of success. But if you press the wrong buttons you slip down the snakes, not up the ladders, as in the game. As I begin to understand this my tension starts to melt. I am not wrong, I am just learning!

Lorna had never thought of life like that before. She had to leave school at an early age and had to start work. The dream also shows her how much thinking can wreck your life. The rules she accepted were that if you got it wrong then you were an idiot and needed to be seen as a loser. Nevertheless, as with each of us, she had an enormous amount of observed life experience that had never been organised into insights until she used the problem solving technique. And that is fundamentally what exploring your dream does – it draws from your amazing collection of experience what is appropriate to your situation. She used a technique to get her through and find healing - see http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/seeing-under-the-surface/

But there are other possibilities too. At times what you access reaches beyond your own experience and knowledge. Edgar Cayce, while in a sleep state, demonstrated this day after day by diagnosing and suggesting cures for people’s sickness even though he had never seen them and knew nothing of medicine. His ability to do this was tested again and again. In fact he was consulted at the White House several times. When asked, also in his sleep state, how it was possible for him to gain such knowledge, he said that each of us connect to what he called a cosmic or universal mind. From this level of mind we can gain information beyond our own learning, but for most of us it is only accessible in sleep. In his book on psychic experience, Dr. Harmon Bro made a study of this and came to the conclusion that it is open to all of us, not simply to unique or unusual individuals. Similarly, Dr. Karagulla, a neuro-psychiatrist who studied it under the name of ‘higher sense perception’, sees it as a breakthrough to greater creativity. The people she observed were all professionals – doctors, business men and women, engineers – using this problem solving approach to aid them in their work. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/

From Oxford Book of Dreams -

Before the Coronation [of King Edward VII] I had a remarkable dream. The State coach had to pass through the Arch at the Horse Guards on the way to Westminster Abbey. I dreamed that it stuck in the Arch, and that some of the Life Guards on duty were compelled to hew off the Crown upon the coach before it could be freed. When I told the Crown Equerry, Colonel Ewart, he laughed and said, ‘What do dreams matter’? ‘At all events,’ I replied, ‘let us have the coach and Arch measured.’ So this was done, and, to my astonishment, we found that the Arch was nearly two feet too low to allow the coach to pass through. I returned to Colonel Ewart in triumph, and said, ‘What do you think of dreams now?’ ‘I think it’s damned fortunate you had one,’ he replied. It appears that the State coach had not been driven through the Arch for some time, and that the level of the road had since been raised during repairs. So I am not sorry that my dinner disagreed with me that night; and I only wish all nightmares were as useful.

WILLIAM CAVENDISH-BENTINCK, DUKE OF PORTLAND, Men, Women and Things, 1937

2. William Blake dreamt his brother showed him a new way of engraving copper. Blake used the method successfully.

3. Otto Loewi dreamt of how to prove that nervous impulses were chemical rather than electrical. This led to his Nobel Prize.

4. Frederich Kekule tried for years to define the structure of benzene. He dreamt of a snake with its tail in its mouth, and woke to realise this explained the molecular formation of the Benzene ring. He was so impressed he urged colleagues, ‘Gentlemen, learn to dream.’

5. Hilprecht had an amazing dream of the connection between two pieces of agate which enabled him to translate an ancient Babylonian inscription.

6. Elias Howe faced the problem of how to produce an effective sewing machine. The major difficulty was the needle. He dreamt of natives shaking spears with holes in their points. This led to the invention of the Singer Sewing machine.

7. Robert Louis Stevenson claims to have dreamt the plot of many of his stories.

8. Albert Einstein said that during adolescence he dreamt he was riding a sledge. It went faster and faster until it reached the speed of light. The stars began to change into amazing patterns and colours, dazzling and beautiful. His meditation on that dream throughout the years led to the Theory of Relativity.

9. A Bell Laboratory engineer by the name of Parkinson, in 1940 was attempting to an automatic device to improve the accuracy of measurements in telephone transmission. He dreamt he was with an antiaircraft crew in a gun pit, and he noticed that one of the guns brought down an airplane every time. One of the gunners asked Parkinson to look at the exposed end of the gun. To his surprise, he saw that his automatic device mounted there. Later research with Parkinson’s device produced the first all-electric gun director. It became known as the M-9 electrical analogue computer.

To approach your dreams in order to discover their creativity, first decide what problematical or creative aspect of your life needs ‘dream power’. Define what you have already learned or know about the problem. Write it down, and from this clarify what it is you want more insight into. If this breaks down into several issues, choose one at a time. Think about the issue and pursue it as much as you can while awake. Read about it, ask people’s opinions, gather information. This is all data for the dream process. If the question still needs further insight, before going to sleep, imagine you are putting the question to your internal store of wisdom, computer, power centre, or whatever image feels right. For some people an old being who is neither exclusively man or woman is a working image.

In the morning note down whatever dream you remember. It does not matter if the dream does not appear to deal with the question. Elias Howe’s native spears were an outlandish image, but nevertheless contained the information he needed. Investigate the dream using the techniques given in the entry processing dreams. Some problems take time to define, so use the process until there is a resolution. If it is a major life problem, it may take a year or so. After all, some resolutions need restructuring of the personality, because the problem cannot disappear while we still have the same attitudes and fears. See: processing dreams; secret of the universe dreams.