Do Creative People Have More Bizarre Dreams? A Reconsideration

Abstract

An attempt was made to replicate earlier studies which have found a relation between waking creativity and dream bizarreness. Two-week dream diaries were collected from 126 undergraduates and the dreams scored for bizarreness using Auld's Primary Process Scale and Kluger's Everydayness Scale. Subjects were also administered four commonly used tests of creativity as well as a test of vocabulary knowledge. Dream bizarreness was found to correlate significantly with scores on some but not all the tests of creativity. However, bizarreness correlated most highly with subjects' level of vocabulary knowledge. Furthermore, partial correlations of creativity test scores with dream bizarreness were not statistically significant when subjects' level of vocabulary knowledge was controlled for. The authors conclude that the connection between waking creativity and dream bizarreness has not been convincingly demonstrated, and that earlier researchers may have found an association between the two because they failed to control for subjects' verbal intelligence and for dream report length. Data is also provided concerning the relation of creativity to dream recall frequency.