New Scientist reports: Scary as nightmares are, they boost your creativity and provide a way to make sure night-time isn’t fright time, as Michelle Carr is discovering in her lab.
Chris and Jess both responded to a “Get Paid to Nap!” advert inviting people who had at least two nightmares a week to take part in a research study. Early one morning in late 2014, they arrived at my workplace – the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory in the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine in Montreal, Canada. They and other volunteers ran through questionnaires, tests of creativity and reported their waking daydreams before we pasted electrodes to their scalps and bodies and finally asked them to take a nap.
