Discussion of John A. Lindon's Article, On Freud's Concept of Dream-Action

This essay adds another fascinating page to the abundant lore on the creative process. In the retrospective account of this interesting discovery, Dr. Lindon has skillfully retained some of the “surprise element” that Dr. V. must have experienced first-hand, and that we have come to recognize as a useful clue in identifying a product as truly creative. (Novelty, a recombination of previously unrelated matrices of thought, improbability, and significance rather than triviality, are some of the other indices.)1

In the creative literature the dream has, of course, been cited very frequently as the context in which the solution to a problem becomes apparent. Compilations of self-revelatory accounts of the creative processes show that many dreams have led to outstanding and revolutionary developments in science.2

At present, there is no evidence to indicate whether the dream state itself is as important a precipitant for the creative contribution as it would seem on the surface. There are no figures on the frequency with which dreams lead to creative products, especially as compared with other states of consciousness, or as compared with the incidence expected on the basis of chance. Nor do we know much about the mental environment that the dream state provides, particularly in regard to conditions which might be conducive to creative activity. We do, however, have some hunches about the need for abandoning usual cognitive habits in order to produce a creative product, and can speculate that customary styles of thinking are likely to be restructured when the usual figure-background relationships become reversed or changed in certain ways, as they are in dream states. But what becomes dislodged and at what time and under what conditions remains unknown.

Although we have long had access to accounts of discoveries that share the temporal gaps that Dr. V. described between experiences