The Molecule of More

participants whose devices were secretly turned off.

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Dopaminergic drugs can do the same thing. Although some patients 
who take dopaminergic drugs for Parkinson’s disease develop devastat-
ing compulsions, others experience enhanced creativity. One patient 
who came from a family of poets had never done any creative writing. 
After starting dopamine-boosting drugs for his Parkinson’s disease, he 
wrote a poem that won the annual contest of the International Asso-
ciation of Poets. Painters treated with Parkinson’s medication often 
increase their use of vivid color. One patient who developed a new 
style after being treated said, “The new style is less precise but more 
vibrant. I have a need to express myself more. I just let myself go.” Just 
like Winnie-the-Pooh: “It is the best way to write poetry, letting things 
come.”
DREAMS: WHERE CREATIVITY 
AND MADNESS MINGLE
Few of us are geniuses or madmen, but we have all experienced the 
midpoint on this continuum: dreams. Dreams are similar to abstract 
thought in that they work with material taken from the external world, 
but they arrange the material in ways that are unconstrained by phys-
ical reality. Dreams often contain the theme of up, such as flying or 
falling from a great height. Dreams often involve future themes, too, 
sometimes in the form of the pursuit of some intensely desired goal 
that’s always just out of reach. Abstract, detached from the real world 
of the senses, dreams are dopaminergic.
Freud named the mental activity that takes place in dreams “pri-
mary process,” which is unorganized, illogical, created without regard 
to the limitations of reality, and driven by primitive desires. Primary 
process has also been used to describe the thought process seen in peo-
ple with schizophrenia. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopen-
hauer wrote, “Dreams are brief madness and madness a long dream.”
Dopamine is unleashed during dreaming, freed from the restrain-
ing influence of the reality-focused H&N neurotransmitters. Activity in 
the H&N circuits is suppressed because sensory input from the outside 

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world into the brain is blocked. This freedom allows dopamine circuits 
to generate the bizarre connections that are the hallmark of dreams. 
The trivial, the unnoticed, and the odd can be elevated to positions of
prominence, supplying us with new ideas that otherwise would have 
been impossible to discover.
The similarity between dreaming and psychosis has fascinated 
many researchers, and has spawned a rich scientific literature. A group 
from the University of Milan in Italy looked at the presence of bizarre 
thought content in the dreams of healthy people, and compared 
them to waking fantasies of both healthy participants and those with 
schizophrenia.
Scientists stimulated waking fantasies
3
using the Thematic Apper-
ception Test (TAT), a series of cards showing ambiguous, sometimes 
emotionally charged pictures of people in various situations. Themes 
include success and failure, competition and jealousy, aggression, and 
sexuality. The participant is asked to study the picture, then make a 
story explaining the scene.
The Italian researchers compared the TAT stories and the descrip-
tions of dreams of patients with schizophrenia to those of healthy com-
parison participants using a scale called the Bizarreness Density Index. 
The results of the tests confirmed that dreams are very much like psy-
chosis. The Bizarreness Density Index was almost exactly the same for 
three categories of mental activity: (1) the descriptions of dreams of
people with schizophrenia, (2) the waking TAT stories of people with 
schizophrenia, and (3) the descriptions of dreams of healthy people. On 
the other hand, the fourth category, waking TAT stories of healthy peo-
ple, scored much lower on the index. This study supports Schopenhau-
er’s conception that living with schizophrenia is like living in a dream.
3 In this context, 
fantasy
refers broadly to the products of the imagination, rather 
than the more common use to signify daydreams of things like unlimited wealth.

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HOW TO HARVEST CREATIVITY FROM A DREAM
If dreaming is similar to psychosis, how do we get back to our normal 
selves? Does it happen all at once, or does it take some time to restore 
logical thought patterns? If it takes time, are we a little bit insane while 
the transition occurs? Here’s something else to consider: sometimes 
when we’re asleep we dream, and other times we don’t. As we make the 
transition from sleep to wakefulness, is our thought process different if
we are waking from a dream or from dreamless sleep? 
Researchers at New York University used the TAT to evaluate the 
kinds of stories people produced after they were woken from dream-
ing sleep and compared them to TAT stories produced after they were 
woken from non-dreaming sleep. They found that fantasies produced 
immediately after dreaming were more elaborate. They were longer, 
and contained more ideas. The imagery was more vivid, and the con-
tent was more bizarre. Here is an example of a story given by a healthy 
volunteer after being woken from a dreaming state. The volunteer was 
shown a picture of a boy looking at a violin:
He’s thinking over his violin. He makes a sad impression. Wait 
a minute! He’s bleeding out of his mouth! And his eyes . . . 
seems like he’s blind!
Another volunteer who had been woken from a dream was shown a 
picture of a young man, slouched on the floor, his head resting on a 
bench. There is a pistol on the floor next to him. Here is the response:
There is a boy in a bed. He may be having some kind of
emotional problem. He is nearly crying, or it may be he’s 
laughing, maybe having a game. It could also be a girl. 
They’re both dead. Or maybe it’s a cat? There is something 
on the floor . . . keys, a flower, or maybe it’s a toy, or a boat.
After being woken from a non-dreaming sleep, this same participant 
was shown another card, and wrote a notably less bizarre description, 

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stating simply that it was “a boy wearing a shirt, who doesn’t have any 
socks on. I don’t see very much else.”
Many people have had the experience of waking from a dream, feel-
ing as if they were caught between two worlds. Thinking is more fluid, 
making leaps from topic to topic, unconstrained by the rules of logic. In 
fact, some people report that they experience their most creative thoughts 
in this crack between the two worlds. The H&N filter that focuses our 
attention on the external world of the senses has not yet been reengaged; 
dopamine circuits continue to fire unopposed, and ideas flow freely.