Metaphoric And Associative Aftereffects Of Impactful Dreams

The proposal that impactful dreaming is "involuntary poetry" suggests that some dreams facilitate creative thinking and have aesthetic aftereffects. In two online studies (n = 107 and 117), participants completed three tasks immediately after awakening from a dream: (a) an index of metaphoric creativity, (b) a measure of the interactive combination of associative fluency and restraint, and (c) a version of the Remote Associates Test. Results indicated that, after existential dreams (Studies 1 and 2) and perhaps transcendent dreams (Study 2), participants who reported dissociative absorption provided higher scores on the interactive combination of associative fluency and restraint. Results for both studies also indicated that participants who reported dissociative absorption following significant loss (including traumatic loss) had lower postdream scores on the remote associates task. Finally, results for Study 2 indicated that participants who awakened from impactful dreams (existential dreams, transcendent dreams, or nightmares) were more likely than those who awakened from mundane dreams to include a metaphoric vehicle and topic in the same ad hoc class (although for conventional metaphors only). This pattern of results indicates that a generative and expressive form of postdream creativity follows awakening from existential and transcendent dreams (but not nightmares), although whether this form of creativity supports aesthetically significant metaphoricity remains unclear.