How to Make Naps Productive and Boost Creativity with Targeted Dream Incubation Techniques

Welcome to the MindBodySpace podcast, where you can boost your resilience just by listening. To help us help you, please subscribe to this podcast and sign up for the newsletter at mindbodyspace.com/podcastnewsletter. There is now solid evidence that stress can affect our biology down to the cellular level, affecting our health, performance, and happiness. In these complex times, it's so important that we educate ourselves on useful versus toxic stress so that we can live our best lives. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a lifestyle medicine specialist and fellowship-trained radiologist who's seen many preventable diseases from the inside out. My passion is sharing science-backed antidotes to toxic mental and physical stress so that you can focus on what's most important to you.

Hi there. I just wanted to share something I read about recently: a systematic way to make sleep more productive. Why? Because let's face it, most of us have a bad attitude towards sleep. We all know we need it, but it's one of the first things to go when we have a lot to do. Sleep is one of those things that we often neglect in favor of other things, sometimes for no good reason other than that we want to squeeze in more things into our day. There's even something called revenge bedtime procrastination. This is an actual thing, and I know I've definitely engaged in this before. It's a state in which we want to reward ourselves at the end of the day with an extra episode of our favorite show, or just hanging out, or just wasting time on our phone because we had a lot of stress that day and maybe we didn't get any free time for ourselves during the day. We kind of feel like a resentful toddler, but we don't have parents to make us go to bed. That's called revenge bedtime procrastination. Some people even think that sleep is a complete and total waste of time. After all, we've got coffee and Red Bull to keep us going, right? It's really important to become more aware of how you feel about sleep. So ask yourself, how useful do you think sleep is in your life? Some people even think that sleep is for the weak, and a lot of us think that we can get by on less sleep than we really need, or that simply everything else is too important—work, social life, scrolling on our phones. You name it. Well, it's time to change your perspective on sleep because sleep is an evolutionary necessity. Because I mean, think about it, almost every human being you know who has ever existed sleeps every single day. I say almost because there is a medical condition called fatal familial insomnia if it's an inherited disorder or sporadic fatal insomnia if it's not an inherited disorder. This is a condition where people actually lose the ability to fall asleep, but it's actually not insomnia. It's due to a specific mutation of a gene for a normal protein called cellular prion protein, and that then causes a neurodegenerative disease in the area of the brain that controls sleep. So aside from this extremely rare disease that affects about 1 or 1.5 people per million, Everybody you know sleeps. The truth is sleep is essential for our health and well-being because even though it doesn't feel like it, sleep is a very active process. So during sleep, our bodies are able to repair and restore tissues, muscles, and organs, you name it. While we sleep, our brains are also removing toxins that build up throughout the day. Think about all the work your brain does during the day. It takes energy and it turns it into metabolic waste. And this waste, like any other waste, is toxic and it needs to be removed. And at night when we're lying down, a special system called the glymphatic system becomes more active and sweeps away all the toxins from the day. Sleep also helps to consolidate memories, both procedural, like driving, performing surgery, or dribbling a ball, and cognitive, like solving math formulas or thinking about philosophy. And during sleep, the brain creates more permanent connections to memorize and to solve problems. Sleep also helps our bodies to fight off infection by boosting our immune system. And sleep has a very big impact on emotional regulation, or our ability to handle our own emotions. And a good night's sleep can really do wonders to reduce stress and anxiety that's so prevalent for everyone these days. So again, our brains are very active through the sleep state. Our bodies are just paralyzed. For most of us, that is. Unless, of course, we have that disease where our brain doesn't paralyze our bodies and we can act out our dreams. A condition called REM behavior disorder, where people have a dopamine deficiency that makes them sleepwalk and act out their dreams. I put a link below to Mike Birbiglia, a really funny comedian who actually suffers from this disorder. So aside from those rare diseases, the rest of us, admittedly, we're not actually doing anything. So this exercise I'm going to share with you is for those of us who want to be productive even during sleep. It's a napping method called targeted dream incubation, where we can actually tell ourselves and influence what we want to dream about, perhaps even what kind of problems we want to solve, or to reinforce the kinds of feelings that we want to feel more. For example, maybe we want to feel more confident. MIT researcher Adam Har Horowitz and his team says in his article called Incubating Dreams, Awakening Creativity, that if we tell ourselves what we want to dream about during the falling asleep stage, which actually is comprised of 9 stages going from fully awake to the asleep state called hypnagogia. In this stage between awake and asleep, there seems to be a lot of loose imaginative creativity going on in our brains. Horowitz says that there is, quote, "distorted perception of space and time and spontaneous fluid idea association." Famous scientists like Edison, Tesla, artists like Edgar Allan Poe and Salvador Dalí, they all accessed this state by napping with a steel ball in hand. When the ball dropped to the floor below just as they fell asleep, they awoke to capture the creative ideas generated in their hypnagogic dreams. End quote. The famous writer Charles Dickens also had sleeping issues and took advantage of the hypnagogic state to create characters like Ebenezer Scrooge dreaming through his past, present, and future. So these scientists and creative geniuses routinely use these methods in order to get novel ideas and make imaginative connections that help them with their work. So Horowitz and his team at MIT wanted to harness this in a more accurate way where they could actually measure when someone starts to drift into the hypnagogic hypnagogic state. They created this device called Dormio. It's a wearable device and you put it on your hand like a glove and it measures muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance. These are measures that can identify the stages of sleep. They get the participant to record their own voice with a prompt that cues them about a topic that they want to dream about. Then as the dreamer starts to fall into the hypnagogic state, the app then plays the previously recorded prompt Then after a few minutes, they prompted the dreamer to record what they were dreaming about so that they wouldn't forget any creative ideas that they had during the state.

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Horowitz thinks that the targeted dream incubation techniques can be helpful for PTSD and for people who suffer from nightmares. The researchers are also focused on the question of, quote, "Whether interfacing with dreams can help us explore and augment the creative potential of our minds," end quote. They have a website where you can do a low-tech, self-administered version for yourself, and I'm putting the link below. You can also find the link and a summary of how to do it on mindbodyspace.com/episode/109. Once you get onto their website that has the special timer, it's pretty self-explanatory. It walks you through recording your own prompt about what you want to dream about and how many dreams you want to catch. The web-based app is set to catch 3 dreams, giving you about 10 to 15 minutes to fall asleep and then allows you to stay in the hypnagogic state for about 3 minutes. Then it wakes you up, not fully awake, but just enough so that you can record all the dreams that are fresh in your mind. It gives you 60 seconds to record it. Then it allows you about 7 minutes to fall back asleep again, assuming that you are not in a fully awake state, and then another 3 minutes of hypnagogia, then the 60 seconds to record what you remember, and so on. So just when you thought sleep was not productive, now you know that you can actually use the hypnagogic state a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. You can nap and take advantage of this hypnagogic state, a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, to get mental training in or to get even more creative. As human beings, creativity is one of the most adaptable components of our brains, and in this age of AI, I think everyone should be working on their creativity even more. This hypnagogic state is a time when your mind is really relaxed and it's open to suggestion so that you can influence your own dreams and make them more fruitful and supportive of what you want for yourself. And somebody did ask the researchers if they were worried about mind control, and although they don't dismiss it fully, they think that this is a terrible mind control tool because first of all, you're not fully asleep, you're semi-conscious, and so you know what's going on. And secondly, you're influencing your own dreams with your own prompt. So here are some tips on how to get the most out of the nap exercise. Tip number 1: Take a few minutes to focus on your intentions for your dreams. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to learn? What do you want to experience? The more clear your intentions are, the more likely you're going to manifest them in your dreams. Next tip: use visualization. Once you have your intentions, visualize them happening in your dreams. See yourself achieving your goals, learning new things, or having positive experiences. The more vivid you can get your visualizations, the more likely you're going to experience them in your dreams. Some people might not be a visual person, so perhaps you're going to use hearing instead. Perhaps there's music or mantra you want to use. Then think about how you want to feel: confident, calm, peaceful, strong, healthy, decisive, powerful, clear-headed, and so on. Now you can use the website or you can record your own voice on your phone allowing 10 to 15 minutes of silence or soft music, then record in your own voice what you want to prompt yourself to dream about. Maybe you'll say something like, "I feel confident as I enter the interview or exam or step onto the stage or on the court." Or you may say, "I feel loving towards my family and friends." and visualize yourself in these situations as clearly as you can. Then when you softly awake by an alarm that you set or using that web app, you can record what you remember from the dream state or keep a journal by your side so you can write down what you dreamt. So have fun with it. Let me know how it goes for you. Again, go to mindbodyspace.com/episode/109 and you'll get links to the research studies that I mentioned here as well as the website with the timer on it and a summary PDF on how to use this technique. Let me know how it goes. I can't wait to hear from you. You can directly record your message on Spotify if that's where you're listening to this podcast, or go to the website mindbodyspace.com and send us a note on the contact form.

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Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, this is Dr.

Juna Bobby MD wishing you and your loved ones wellness.