Search

Psychoanalysis bases its theory and clinical practice on the interpretation of dreams. From the monumental work of the Freudian Traumdeutung, which declares the investigation of dream processes the "royal road to the unconscious", up to the fascinating speculations of Wilfred Bion, who overturns the assumption without undermining it, saying that it is not the unconscious that creates the dream, but the dream creates the unconscious, we can confirm the basic importance of dreaming in health and in illness. A respectable, but smaller amount of studies in the psychoanalytic field is dedicated to sleep, the physiological premise of dreaming, a phenomenon common to humans and other animals, which from the original context of myth has today increasingly become the object of the privileged investigation of neurophysiology and of neuroscience. This work instead dedicates itself to a third, less well-known and celebrated theme: that of the psychic processes that precede falling asleep; and, symmetrically, to the reverse path of awakening. The passage from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa, an experience that is both banal and disturbing, is a space of suspended consciousness in which we have the possibility of surprising ourselves; a very private, hyper-subjective zone in which artists and scientists sometimes have privileged contact with the preconscious and with creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marcello Cesa-Bianchi played an important role in fostering the experimental studies of Italian psychologists on the function of visual images within the process of creative thinking during distinct states of vigilance (wakefulness, resting state, sleep onset, and REM sleep). He moved from the observation that finding innovative solutions for novel artistic, scientific, or everyday-life problems requires a flexible and creative recombination of some items of prior knowledge. This paper outlines the items of experimental evidence supporting his presupposition that intentionally generated and transformed mental images can facilitate the solution of problems and the subsequent hypotheses as to how innovative and intuitive strategies of manipulating mental images can work during wakefulness and other states of vigilance. After sketching the findings of studies in waking supporting a close relationship between the ability to mentally manipulate images in a holistic way and creative thinking, the findings of several recent studies showing that an insight heralding the solution may occur during sleep, resting, mind wandering, and sleep onset are reported. All these states of vigilance foster both spreading activation of items of episodic and semantic knowledge along associated networks (involved also in dream generation during sleep) and restructuring of problem representation through a transfer of relationships between different types of information. Overall REM sleep may work as an incubation period capable to enhance solution rates in discovery of hidden mathematical rules and solving anagrams. Almost all the items of evidence converge to support the notion that a period of sleep - as well of resting, mind wandering, or sleep onset - is beneficial for solving problems regardless of their artistic, scientific, or everydaylife characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]