The Committee of Sleep
How Artists, Scientists and Athletes Use Dreams
for Creative Problem-Solving and How You Can Too
Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett, 2001
All rights reserved
Cover art: Shigeru Matsuzaki
First edition: Random House, 2001
Kindle Edition: 2015
Table of Contents
Introduction
Each night before retiring, the French Surrealist poet, St. Paul Roux, hung a sign on his bedroom door which read: "Poet at work." John Steinbeck wrote: "It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." We echo this sentiment each time we advise a friend to: "Sleep on it!"
These quotes dont name the dream as spokesperson for the Committee of Sleep. However, most stories of nocturnal problem solving involve either dreams or hypnagogic imagery--the pictures that go through our minds as we fall asleep or slowly awaken. As well see, each of the two states seems to be best at solving a different type of problem. Research confirms what people have always known: inspiration to create and even the answers to formal problems of logic can indeed arrive in dreams.
In The Committee of Sleep , Ive gathered remarkable examples, historic and modern, of what dreams have brought to invention and art. A Nobel laureates scientific experiment, music from classical masterpieces to pop chartbusters, the occasional golf swing, innumerable novels and paintings, and two entire written languages--all document the contribution which the Committee of Sleep has made to our waking world.
The major concerns of dreaming are obviously our personal issues--childhood slights, current moods, and how we get along with significant others. However, these aspects of dreaming have been covered thoroughly. Essentially, all other dream books focus on them. The Committee of Sleep will instead examine objective problems in dreams--the scientific and artistic--and what these may tell us about the nature of dreaming.
Chapters are organized by discipline, beginning with the visual arts--the fields closest to natural dream imagery. Later chapters describe what dreams bring to intellectual fields such as science and math. Wed all like the committee to slip us a few prize-winning ideas, so the book will also explore how common these dreams are, who has them, and what we can do to produce them.
The idea of dream creativity is so compelling that a few bogus stories enjoy great tenacity in our urban folklore. In the science chapter, Ill discuss the oft told, but never actually dreamed, origins of the models for both DNA and the atom. These fabricated stories lead to skepticism about dream productivity. But most historical examples do check out, and Ill share many of these intriguing accounts in the dreamers own words.
Some writers glamorize dreaming as wiser than waking thought. Others characterize it as useless nonsense. The stories in The Committee of Sleep will demonstrate that dreaming is neither consistently wise nor useless. Dreaming is simply the mind continuing to think about our problems in a very different biological and psychological state. No one would suggest all waking thought achieves profound resultsneither would we expect all dreaming to do so. The dreams power lies in the fact that it is so different a mode of thought--it supplements and enriches what weve already done awake.
Chapter 1) In the Gallery of the Night
Born in South Carolina during the Depression, Jasper Johns artistic aspirations led him to New York where he painted for several years without finding a unique voice. In 1954, he resolved to stop becoming and be an artist. His inspiration was a dream in which he saw himself painting a large flag, and the next day he began exactly that project. This became Flag and a lengthy series of flag pictures followed which established Johns as a major artist. His work continued with other simple, bold paintings that highlighted the design artistry of commonplace objects. He disavowed the paintings that preceded Flag--destroying those still in his possession and purchasing and shredding any that came to his attention later. Since he has never shown anything drawn before this, wrote one biographer, the extraordinary initial impact of the image and the authority with which it is painted give the impression of a finished artist suddenly sprung from nowhere. Johns later told an interviewer, I have not dreamed of any other painting. I must be grateful for such a dream! He laughed. The unconscious thought was accepted by the conscious gratefully.
Dreams have played a role in visual art since man began to represent the world. The astonishing images of the night have always inspired artists. A bird-staff and other fantastic elements appear on the cave walls of Lascaux, France. This earliest known human art, produced between 40,000 to 10,000 BC, caused Pablo Picasso to exclaim, "We have invented nothing! The Lascaux paintings are believed to represent prehistoric dreams.
Scholars know more about the strikingly similar cave art of Californias Ojai Valley, or Valley of the Moon. The earliest date to 1000 AD, but legends associated with them survived when missionaries arrived in the late 1700's. These rock paintings were done by the 'atiswinic --a type of shaman, literally meaning dreamer or having a dream. The 'atiswinic drew fantastic animals and horned anthropomorphs set against geometric grids. We have no texts for most of the paintings and cant know exactly which ones are dreams. But a few were told to the missionaries as dream accounts. One of these depicts the nose of a Coyote growing after he chased girls around begging for a kiss. A second shows a man capturing the retreating sun with a stick. In yet another, a swordfish tosses a whale around.
Other tribes around the world routinely used dreams as a basis for visual arts. These include the Chippewa of North America whose dream images determined the patterns of their banners and beadwork, and the Saroa of India who painted their dreams on the walls of houses. Australian aborigines have long depicted their dreamtime with distinctive dot paintings on bark.
In Europe, there was no mandate for dream art, but artists nevertheless often portrayed nighttime visions. When religious art was favored--and the Church the main patron--painters commonly depicted the great dreams of the Bible. The scriptures dictated the content--the dreams of Jacob, Mary, and Pharaoh were favorites. But artists conveyed the state of dreaming according to their own nocturnal world. Figures faded into mist for one, hung suspended in midair for another.
Some painted their own dreams directly. German artist Albrecht Durers 1525 watercolor of a savage storm bears the following inscription:
I saw this image in my sleep, how many great waters poured from heaven... drowning the whole land... The deluge fell with such frightening swiftness, wind, and roaring that when I awoke, my whole body trembled; for a long while I could not come to myself. So when I arose in the morning, I painted what I had seen.
Visionary William Blake portrayed dreams of Queen Catherine and Biblical Jacob in his distinctive mystic style, characters soaring through the heavens. He painted his own as "Young Night's Thoughts (1818) with himself lying on the ground dreaming, the action of the dream painted next to him, a poem based on the same dream beneath that, and finally a straightforward account of the dream.