What do you see?
If you are eight or nine years old reading this you will see many things—the top of a fence pole, a porthole on a ship, or maybe a monster’s eyeball. The image above is an example of one kind of question found on tests for measuring creativity. When this test is given to elementary
schoolkids, there are about ninety unique answers per group.They envision it as a cave that a tiger is about to leap out of, or the rim of a bike wheel ridden by a superhero; it might be a manhole cover in a street or the entrance to a tunnel through a mountain. When junior and senior high school kids take the test, though, those ninety unique answers per group drop to about twenty or fewer. When this test is given to adults, it’s a big goose egg, except that they don’t see that; adults get only an average of two answers per group, including the obvious: “it’s a circle” or “it’s a circle on a white page”
From an exciting tiger’s cave to a boring circle. Why?
It may seem strange to begin a book about dreaming by talking about creativity. But creativity and dreaming are intimately linked. They use the same neurological processing system, called the default network. This system of cognition is not only responsible for imagination, but also emotional regulation, social perspectives and empathy, and meaning-making. This network, and the larger social brain, is intensely active in dreaming, processing memories, and regulating emotions. Creativity is an essential component of empathy, wherein order to feel for the other, we have to imagine stepping into their shoes and view new forms of interaction and relationship.
Not surprisingly, then, children who score lower on creativity tests exhibit higher aggression than children who are assessed as more creative.
Creativity research has found that today’s young people are growing up “more narrow-minded, less intellectually curious, and less open to new experiences.” A sobering list of things young people are losing includes imagination, perception, the ability to synthesize information, and the motivation to look at things from different perspectives. Imagination, creativity, and play, once the established domains of children, are now on the endangered list. Yet these very aspects that adults mistakenly tried to “mature” kids out of are turning out to be the skills all of us—adults and children—need the most.
Narrow-minded kids grow up to become narrow-minded adults. Of the many dire problems we collectively face in the world today, one is a trend toward political extremism. That narrowed perspective, as well as the shrinking motivation to seek new perspectives, also has consequences for other problems we are facing, such as climate change. Young people’s sense of climate change these days is characterized by hopelessness, and rather than this outlook inspiring action, it is associated with a lack of environmental engagement. One can’t help but think of Runco’s students who found numerous problems but were unable to suggest any possible solutions.
The default network is a vital piece of our cognition. And yet, much to the alarm of neuroscientists, there are numerous factors getting in the way of our spending time nurturing and utilizing it. It gets utilized in sleep through dreams, and in waking time when we stop focusing and allow our minds to wander, imagine, and float freely, but these windows of opportunity are closing. Technology is one factor that pulls us away from daytime unfocused reflection. Our phones also disrupt deep sleep. Add to that the shift in schools to standardized testing, the data-obsessed and overly serious nature of business, overscheduling, lack of play, and biases that favor known efficiency over the uncertainties of the creative process and trying out new ideas, and the default network, with its critical cognitive processes, is pushed to the periphery.
All told, our society is forgetting to dream. It may be the most critical problem facing society today.
Dreaming lifts our minds beyond the constraints of the everyday. Creativity turns these ideas into things and brings our greatest imaginings into waking realities. It is by using the engine of our creative imagination that we work through the “how” of manifesting our life’s dreams; entertaining possibilities, elaborating upon them, and imagining alternative scenarios. It is our innate source for problem-solving. Life really is the stuff of imagination; if we are able to see it, we can find a way to make it. In a direct ratio, the limit of our imagination is the limit of our living.
This is a book about dreaming. It is also a book about creativity. Some neuroscientists call dreaming a hypercreative state, and one of the arguments that will be made in this book is that the two are synonymous in origin. We access our creativity through dreams and our spontaneous imagination, simultaneously reaching our innate problem-solving capacity and developing that system of cognition the same way we would develop a muscle through a workout.
Creativity can be developed and the creative slumps we go through can be circumvented. My approach to working with dreams develops creative skills, offering an antidote to the creativity crisis. I will teach you, for example, how night dreams show us where we are blocked in waking life, how to identify these blocks, and unlike Runco’s students, unlock your fluency skills to come up with numerous ways to overcome them. You will develop the critical skills needed to choose which of these possible solutions is the best fit and learn how to work with multiple perspectives to imagine numerous outcomes. You will learn that some of our night dreams reveal hidden personal potentials, and how night dreaming and waking dreaming can be bridged, so that you can bring your conscious attention to subconscious mechanisms to fuel real change in your life. More than anything, you will learn how to dream beyond self-imposed limitations and bring those dreams into waking manifestation.
It is each of us, collectively, who are the creators of families, organizations, governments, and societies. If we lose our ability to dream—to imagine a world we want to live in and the means by which we can create it—where is our future? The study I’ve been referencing has been tracking the declining creativity scores for over two decades; many of those first children studied are already moving into adulthood. Their, and our, future is now.
Excerpted from THE SECRET MIND Unlock the Power of Your Dreams to Transform Your Life, by Bonnie Bucker, PHD