My wife's been sick.  Now it's my turn.  It's 6:30 a.m., and I've not slept since 7:00 a.m. yesterday.  Salvador Dali is one of my favorite painters because of the wildly creative pictures he would illustrate.  I've been told that in order to achieve this apparition of images, he would stay awake for as long as he possibly could.  He would sit, so I'm told, holding a key above a metal pail.  Upon drifting to sleep his hand would relax, the key would fall striking the pail.  The noise from the pail would awaken him from his nodding, interrupting whatever forced REM sleep was occurring.  Thus, he would have his inspiration!  Whatever he saw in his short-lived dream, he would then paint.

This begs the question: How do sleep and creativity relate?

Have you ever had an idea at 3:00 a.m. that was absolutely brilliant?  My friend Jeremy and I used to have these ideas all the time.  Which, for a while, lead us to believe that creativity was disproportional to sleep.  The less sleep you have the more creative you are, or so went the logic.

One night we had this great idea to make our own version of Monopoly, complete with the things we adored the most.  I'm sure it had things like QBasic, Dr Pepper, and no doubt the most valued property was a date with Kristen Evans (or something like that ... the salient details escape me at the moment.)  We were so enthused by the idea that we worked on it the rest of the night and into the morning.  On we labored, salivating over the masterpiece that awaited us.  We finally called it quits around 7:00 or so and got some sleep.

We woke up later that day to quite a surprise.  Our idea, which had once seemed so brilliant, was now sort of ... embarrassing.  A new Monopoly?  What were we thinking?  How can you improve upon perfection?  Henceforth, we invoked the "Light of Day Rule" which states:

"If you have a great idea at 3:00 a.m. do nothing with it until you see it in the light of day.  If it still looks good, you may proceed."

I've avoided a lot of wasted time using this rule.  As it turns out, creativity and sleep are quite proportional.  What about The Dali? I think that story is proof enough of the positive.  It was not during the deprivation of sleep which his inspiration came.  It was during the brief moment of sweet, revitalizing, oh-how-I-long-for-you sleep.