Ellis Padgett- Assignment #16- Dream Big [Speech]

Ellis Padgett

Matthew Logsdon

AP English Language and Composition

12/14/19

Dream Big

I am here to tell you all a horror story.

Three weeks ago, I fell asleep in Mrs. Deweese’s class. I should be dead right now. I’m not, but I should be. But I just couldn’t help it.You know? My eyes got so heavy, she’s my first period, it was 8:30 A.M.! I should be asleep. I’m kidding. 

I am a good student. I do my work, I pay attention, but here I am. I’m tired and quite frankly, uninspired. Uninspired to learn, to be involved, to create. Uninspired to stay awake. 

Sleep deprivation is quite common across the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control report that 35.2% of adults and 68.8% of teenagers are getting less than the recommended amount of sleep (CDC 1). 

But I’m not here to talk about how we should change the school starting times or collectively decide that eight p.m. is the perfect bedtime for us. Because when I was falling asleep in that class, it wasn’t just because I was tired. It was because I was unmotivated. 

I have conducted my own little research project on our levels of inspiration and motivation. Is it truly a problem? Let’s see. I typed in the words “Inspiration Help” in the Google search bar. In “0.52 seconds” I got “about 1,030,000,000 results”. But so what, right, Google can give you millions of results for cats with bread on their faces, too. Yet when I looked at the top links, I saw the labels such as “8 ways to find inspiration…”, “50 ways to find inspiration”, “25 Simple Ways for Entrepreneurs to Find Inspiration”, “4 Ways to Get Inspired”... are we seeing a problem here? Maybe I’m not the only one who has ever felt uninspired. 

Now what if I told you you can fix both of these problems- fatigue and inspiration- and modify your life by doing one simple thing: sleep. 

It’s the perfect solution! We all already know how to do it. First I’m going to talk about how sleep strengthens the synapses in your brain; then I will talk about dreams; and finally I am going to offer examples where these processes translated into life. All this to prove that you have the ability to inspire yourself while asleep.

When you sleep, your brain goes through 4 stages that have the ability to link different aspects of your life, and therefore form new ideas. Each stage lets you fall deeper and deeper into sleep until you reach Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. 

If we set dreaming aside and focus on actual connections within the brain, we see that the brain is forging pathways. Penny Lewis with the Psychology Department at Cardiff University recounts the events in an interview. During Slow Wave Sleep, Lewis says, the hippocampus (which stores “memories of events and places”) and the neocortex (which stores memories of “facts, ideas, and concepts”), pull out memories that are related. In the next stage- REM- the chemical “acetylcholine” covers the brain, allowing the hippocampus and neocortex to easily reach each other; and as Lewis states, “connections between neurons can be more easily formed, strengthened, or weakened” (Yong). 

To put it simply, your different memories connect with each other while you’re asleep, and then form new neurons and synapses that are ready for when you wake up. If you sleep on something, this process may actually allow you to wake up with a new perspective, and give you ideas. Give you inspiration. 

Inspiration lets you dream big! But dreaming also gives you inspiration. We’ve covered how your brain can create connections while you’re asleep; now let’s talk about how it can give you ideas. Let’s talk about dreaming.

Psychologist Emma Young writes in her periodical in the journal New Scientist that epiphanies are best supported by the unconscious mind engaging in creative activities such as day-dreaming, where you’re not entirely asleep (Young 34). 

Carolyn Gregoire of the Huffington Post further consolidates research on dreaming in non-REM sleep. It’s called “hypnagogia”, and is analogous to Stage 1 of the sleep cycle, where the brain waves both associate with wakefulness and sleep. Stage 1 and hypnagogia offer the unique opportunity to dream while being aware. Dr. Milena Pavlova states “you experience some phenomena of sleep while you are still able to be awake and remember them”(Gregoire, Hypnagogia).  In short, dreaming is not specific to REM sleep. So how can we use this to find inspiration?

Hypnagogia allows a realistic journey into the dreamscape that doesn’t require the long cycle-through of stages all the way to REM. And it’s a journey many have already taken advantage of. 

For instance, famous artist Salvador Dali is known for a painting that he saw while in hypnagogia, using what he called his “slumber with a key” technique to enter hypnagogia and come back out (Dali, The Persistence of Memory). Dali found inspiration in his dreams.

Now, dreaming occurs both in hypnagogia and REM sleep. The difference is if you are woken up during the REM stage, say by an alarm, you are likely to be groggy. Possibly for a long time, like in first period Calculus with Mrs. Deweese. But both of these processes of dreaming offer immense potential for creativity. To prove it all we have to do is look through history. 

Many examples exist to prove the presence of inspiration through sleep. The Beatles’ “Yesterday” was heard in a dream; Edgar Allen Poe suffered from nightmares that he transferred to poetry (Gregoire, How Dreaming). 

Perhaps more notably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came to her via sleep. Einstein dreamt about startled cows turning around simultaneously and awoke with inspiration for his Theory of Relativity. Google came from a dream about downloading the entire internet onto one single source (Santos).

You can draw inspiration from sleep. Connections between synapses are formed, and dreams occur in two stages. We’ve seen them transfer to real life and have amazing impacts. 

Some counter that our schedules simply don’t permit these patterns. That modern life simply decides for you when you wake up, that we don’t get a choice whether we finish our cycles and wake up prepped and inspired. To that I say this: Choose sleep. In every possible manner, go to bed earlier, let yourself have the opportunity to dream and self-inspire. We don’t choose our schedules. We choose how we adapt to them. Harvard Psychologist Deidre Barrett writes that simple actions such as writing down and thinking about your problem before bed can lead to productive dreams and inspiration (Deidre, 38). 

Maximize your opportunity for inspiration through sleep. Take meaning from your dreams. What if Einstein had woken up and simply said, “wow, what an odd dream about cows.” What if the creator of Google had woken up and thought, “that’s just silly.” 

The purpose of this was not to offer an excuse for falling asleep in math class. It was to prove that the key to inspiration might be as simple as a necessary part of life. When you sleep your brain forges new connections, you dream, and there are examples to prove this. Don’t fall asleep in math class, guys. But don’t forget to fall asleep at night, too. Dreaming big, might just mean go to sleep. 

Annotated Bibliography

Barrett, Deirdre. “Answers In Your Dreams. (Cover Story).” Scientific American Mind, vol. 22, no. 5, Nov. 2011, p. 27. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind1111-26.

“CDC - Data and Statistics - Sleep and Sleep Disorders.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2 May 2017, www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html.

Dali, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gregoire, Carolyn. “How Dreaming Can Inspire Your Most Brilliant Ideas.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/famous-ideas-from-dreams_n_4276838.

Gregoire, Carolyn. “Hypnagogia, The State Between Sleep And Wakefulness, Is Key To Creativity.” HuffPost, 22 Feb. 2016, www.huffpost.com/entry/hypnogogia-dreams-creativity_n_56c5d16ce4b0c3c55053de38?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAB6xCSb1ZRPDESbSKb36iZln3phFfbyDtr125Fso0ISGPO1SUFPAe2Rm_KIlHx3DN1g7ucZRv8ElcIKRjKxPKDksjn9ccSu1h6s877HoRFrQQZDJACh9B0soyUTvV8hdqSJhbU6Xfsl2kh3xcksr_KuKa76tLdMwD38B8nOPfOXz.

Santos, Danny F. “15 Famous Ideas That Were Invented in Dreams.” Theclever, Theclever, 25 Apr. 2017, www.theclever.com/15-famous-ideas-that-were-invented-in-dreams/.

Yong, Ed. “A New Theory Linking Sleep and Creativity.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 17 May 2018, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/sleep-creativity-theory/560399/.

Young, Emma. “Cultivate Your Unconscious.” New Scientist, vol. 239, no. 3188, July 2018, p. 34. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(18)31353-8.