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Key points
- Bizarreness in dreaming reflects the deep creativity of the mind during sleep.
- The strangest, most irrational elements of dreams can bear tremendous creative gifts.
- Rather than bizarreness, we should speak of the innate playfulness of dreaming.
“Dreams are too bizarre to make any sense.”
From ancient times to the present, this has been a common criticism of dreams. In the 1970s and 1980s, several scientists put this criticism at the center of their theories that dreaming is ultimately nonsense, a meaningless by-product of random neural firings in the brain during sleep.
Most psychotherapists who have experience working with dreams reject this kind of neural reductionism. And yet, some of these same therapists still accept the premise that the bizarreness of dreaming is a problem, and the goal of interpretation should be to translate the wild, unruly dream into a form of rational language.
Those who emphasize the irrational weirdness of dreaming overlook the abundant empirical evidence that most dreams are not especially bizarre. Systematic research on dream content over several decades has actually found that a large proportion of dreams tend to be mundane and fairly realistic, revolving around familiar characters, settings, and activities. There may be minor discrepancies from waking life, but nothing that justifies calling the whole dream pure nonsense. In fact, many dreams are so non-bizarre, they are impossible to distinguish from a report of an ordinary waking life experience.
It’s clear the dreaming imagination is capable of producing entirely realistic, life-like replicas of the waking world if it wants to do so. This raises the possibility that bizarreness in dreaming is not random or accidental but meaning-driven and creatively expressive. It’s a feature, not a bug.
When something in a dream becomes weird, it may be taking advantage of the profound liberation of sleep to go beyond what is to imagine what might be. With no sensory input or motor output to worry about, unconstrained by the limits of waking reality, the mind is free to play in the infinite imaginal expanse of the dream world. This open-ended freedom seems to be the psychological genesis of dreaming’s creative power.
Perhaps, instead of bizarreness, we should speak of the playfulness of dreams as a way of accounting for their strangest features and recognizing their potential values. When we look at dreaming as a kind of play—the imaginative play of the mind in sleep—we can appreciate how the most “bizarre” dreams can bear tremendous gifts of creativity. These gifts include beautiful images, primal emotions, mythological harmonies, innovative insights, healing guidance, radical metamorphoses, and existential revelations.
This is why dreaming has always played such a valuable role as a source of creative inspiration for artists all over the world throughout history. It enables us to stretch our minds, follow our deepest curiosities wherever they lead, and explore possibilities beyond the limits of waking reality.
Can You Do Anything to Enhance the Playful Creativity of Your Dreams?
Yes, you can. But first, a word of caution: if you ever have dreams so disjointed and fragmentary that they cause you distress in waking life, please consider consulting a mental health professional. There’s a difference between healthy playfulness and the signs of mental illness.
The simplest way to stimulate creative dreaming is to make sure you are getting regular, restful sleep. If it’s possible to let yourself wake up slowly in the morning, that can give the dream images and feelings from the night a better chance of surviving the journey into your waking awareness. Keeping a dream journal can also help by giving you greater familiarity with your own basic patterns of dream content. The more you know about your ordinary dreams, the more easily you’ll be able to spot your extraordinary dreams, the ones that deviate in interesting ways from your baselines.
You might also consider sharing your dreams with someone else you trust, like a friend or family member, as an extension of the playful energies of the dreams themselves. Think of it as sharing an amusing story, one that just happened to occur in a dream. Even the scientific reductionists admit that bizarre dreams can be irresistibly compelling and sometimes quite entertaining, naturally eliciting a desire to be shared with other people. I believe this is not just incidental, but actually a vital expansion of dreaming’s creative potentials from the individual’s mind into the social world. It’s one of the ways that dreams inspire creativity beyond the personal sphere and contribute to the cultural dynamics of the community.
Throughout history, indigenous traditions in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas have encouraged communal dream-sharing for exactly this reason, to allow individual dreamers to have a creative voice in collective life. You can revive that ancient practice today simply by sharing an unusually playful dream with someone you know and perhaps inviting them to share their most bizarre dream with you. No analysis or interpretation is necessary, just mutual respect and an openness to being surprised.
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References
Knudson, R.M. (2001). Significant dreams: Bizarre or beautiful? Dreaming (11), 167-177.
