The committee of sleep : how artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving--and how you can, too

"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." -- John Steinbeck

Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples showing how some of the world's most creative people have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. From these, she draws lessons on lucid dreaming and its application to our problems great and small.

In the visual arts, for example, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built surrealism out of dreams. Today, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, dreams her extraordinary designs into life. In film, "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman; so have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, many dream of winning a Nobel Prize, but physiologist Otto Loewi worked with the Committee on the medical experiment that earned him the real prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi dreamed of resistance.

Since Freud, we have taken it for granted that our dreams tell us something about where we are and where we have been. Now, in The Committee of Sleep, Barrett vividly reveals how dreams can also tell us where we could possibly go -- and how to get there.

Read this book, sleep on it, and see what transpires!