Otto Loewi wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea. He writes it quickly, half asleep, then goes back to sleep. In the morning he looks at the paper and doesn’t understand anything. Crooked marks, a lost track. The next night the dream returns, the same. This time he gets up and goes straight to the laboratory. From there began the experiment on frog hearts that would change the history of neurophysiology and years later would lead him to the Nobel Prize. It’s a very concrete image: the bed, the paper, the rush to the workbench. It also serves to remind you of a simple thing. In sleep the mind continues to work, and every now and then it works well.
When we talk about dreams and creativity we often slip into a cute anecdote, a little story to bring up every now and then. Here, however, there is something more solid. A 2025 study by Gintarė Štuikytė and Tadas Stumbrys tried to test the link between lucid dreams and creative production with a specific task: writing a haiku. Not a vague idea, not a confession after the fact. A short text, with a narrow form, to really compose.
When the dream stops being fog
The research design was clean. Forty participants in total: twenty lucid dreamers and twenty people in the control group. Lucid dreamers had to write a haiku twice, once while awake and once during a lucid dream. The control group wrote only while awake. Then those texts were evaluated to understand which ones were most creative. The result remains there, clear enough to deserve attention: the haiku composed in the lucid dream were more creative, while in the waking condition the two groups showed no significant differences.
The liveliest part of the study, however, lies in the observations of the participants. Writing in the lucid dream was more difficult than expected. You had to remember the task, stay lucid enough to carry it out, then hold on to the text until you woke up without losing it along the way. In the midst of this effort there was also an advantage: those who managed to do so described an environment that was much richer, stranger, fuller of connections. Colors, sounds, scene changes, sensory details. All stuff that weighs a lot for a short and visual text like a haiku.
Here the discussion stops remaining closed in laboratories and sleep manuals. Creativity, seen from here, resembles less a mysterious gift and more an ability to grasp connections as they pass. In the lucid dream those connections seem to arrive more easily, because the mental material appears already mixed, already deformed, already freer than during the day. Then you still need a hand to pick it up. You need a shape. You need memory. But the trigger lights up there.
Read this way, the matter of lucid dreams ceases to seem exotic. It becomes almost logical. In ordinary dreams the brain mixes up memories, emotions and residues of the day. In lucid dreaming the same thing happens, with the addition of a form of presence. He who dreams knows he is dreaming. This detail changes everything, because a small direction also enters an already mobile material. It is not always enough to control the scene completely, but it is often enough to orient it, to look for an image, to follow a phrase, to transform a mental landscape into a creative object.
The study on haiku, in fact, suggests precisely this: the difference is not that lucid dreamers are automatically brighter when awake. The difference emerges when they enter that specific state. There the terrain changes. The association runs more freely. The sensory material expands. The form remains short and this helps, because a haiku thrives on a precise image, a quick cut, a small perceptive twist. In a mental place where the juxtapositions come more vividly, that type of writing finds space.
The simplest lesson remains useful even when awake
The part that seems most interesting to me is here. There is no need to turn lucid dreaming into a private religion or a miraculous technique. Just look at what it highlights. Those who participated in the study spoke of intense environments, sensory details, unexpected scenarios. He was basically talking about attention. Of presence. Of a mind that stops enough to really feel what’s around it, even if that “surroundings” are a dreamscape.
When we are awake, something very similar happens, only in a poorer and more distracted way. Let’s get over things. We consume them without looking at them. A dirty window in the morning, the sharp noise of the tram, a cup left in the sink, a spot of sun on the floor: all this matter exists and almost always slips away. Creativity often begins when a mind holds it back for a second longer. Lucid dreaming, from this point of view, shows the mechanism discovered, like a screw sticking out of the wall.
Then of course, the dream alone is not enough. The old story of Loewi also demonstrates this. The idea arrives in sleep, but real work requires awakening, testing, verification, the shape given to things. The dream opens a door. Then it’s someone’s turn to cross it.
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