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REPORT
T
hroughout history, those
with artistic careers have
discussed shut-eye as both an
inspirational force and an inspiration-
sapping foe. Franz Kafka’s insomnia
plays out in The Metamorphosis,
as the novella’s protagonist Gregor
transforms into a cockroach after a
sleepless, fitful night; the writer had a
habit of working from 11pm until 3am,
claiming that the weird hallucinations
of sleeplessness helped produce his
most creative ideas. Salvador Dalī had
similar convictions: he’d sit in a chair
holding a key until he fell asleep, at
which point he’d drop the key on to a
plate placed beneath his seat. The noise
would wake Dalī up and the artist
would start to paint, harnessing the
fleeting liminal state between waking
and dreaming known as hypnagogia.
Yet as most of us are all too aware,
sleep is vital for brain functions
including how neurons (brain cells)
communicate with one another, as
well as impacting the heart, lungs,
metabolism, immune function, mood
and disease resistance. Numerous
studies have shown that a chronic
lack of good-quality sleep increases
the risk of disorders including high
blood pressure, cardiovascular disease,
diabetes, depression and obesity,
according to The National Institute
of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Sleep is vital for staying alive... and
vital for staying creative, too.ARE CREATIVES MORE
PRONE TO POOR SLEEP?
While brand designer-turned-artist
Shuhua Xiong acknowledges that
most people will encounter insomnia
at some point in their lives, she does
feel that it might be more prevalent in
creative types due to their tendency to
“overly analyse and reflect. It’s part of
our livelihood,” Shuhua says. “Life and
work can be mashed up sometimes.Many great artists in
history have insomnia,
like Vincent Van Gogh and
Louis Bourgeois. So you’re
definitely not alone! For
me I find that the limbo
between asleep and awake
is my raw consciousness. It’s
liberating to wander and get
lost in my own mind.”
In 2017, University of Haifa
researchers compared art students
and social science students, finding
that art students slept for longer, but
that “visually creative people reported
disturbed sleep leading to difficulties
in daytime functioning,” wrote one of
the study’s authors, Neta Ram-Vlasov,
of the Graduate School of Creative
Art Therapies. The study’s subjects
took visual and verbal creativity tests
(however, we’d take the view that
“measuring” how creative someone is
must be an inexact science); recorded
their sleep in a diary; and had
electrophysiological sleep recordingstaken as they slept using
a wrist activity monitor.
Those with higher levels of
visual creativity were found
to have lower-quality sleep,
despite the fact that art
students slept more. “It’s
possible that a ‘surplus’ of
visual creativity makes the
individual more alert, and
this could lead to sleep disturbances,”
the researchers theorised.
Another study, this time from the
University of California in San Diego,
indicated that the four or five periods
of REM sleep we experience at night
(which typically last for 90-120 minutes
each), enhance our creative processing
more than any other sleep or waking
state. If we’re to believe this, it makes
it all the more infuriating that so many
creative types suffer with insomnia,
whatever their age: Dr Dione Healey
of University of Otago’s Department
of Psychology and Mark Runco, a
scholar in creativity and cognitive- 66 -
Untitled artwork by Shuhua Xiong, who belives creatives suffer from insomnia more than most.Neta Ram-Vlasov.