“[A] study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.”

This article is about a snake-like robot that can roll up a pole for doing things such as inspecting oil and gas pipelines or the underside of a bridge. The robot’s designer, Dennis Hong, says the idea for the robot came to him in a dream.

In the episode about notebooks, http://explodingcreativity.com/2008/07/notebooks, I mentioned one use for a notebook is as a dream log. The hard part of mining your dreams for ideas is remembering the dreams. Writing them down helps us remember them and then to associate the dreams with new ideas or whatever we’re working on at the time.