Heightened dream recall ability linked to increased creativity, connectivity

When I am in a period of intensive writing, I recall my dreams at a higher than normal rate. The dreams also feel more layered than normal dreams, although I recognize that this is not quite knowable. I will often record these dreams as part of keeping my literary diaries. My most compelling narratives are dreamlike, in that their composition borrows a structure from the mere recording of dreams. These narratives feel like dry land dreaming that, like dry land training for skating, allows me to dial in on the technical aspects of the very fluid experience that is dreaming.

This connection between dreaming and writing is of great interest to me. I am somewhat surprised that my most compelling writing was not inspired directly by any dream that I remember. The phenomenon of the one and the other are that similar. A kind of background hallucination can be intuited when writing fiction. In my experience, these hallucinations indicate that the writing has attained a degree of formal completion. I observe the characters of my story as though they were made of clay and also diminutive. Why clay? I am unsure, but I think it has to do with this clay’s yielding but inelastic quality.

I am anecdotally convinced that dreaming is beneficial. Every time I dream I wake up feeling refreshed.

Is there any links to The Brain Network and neurogenesis?

The more I'm interested in my dreams and the more of them I write down the more of them I recall. But since all that writing and analyzing takes a long time, I rarely do it anymore, so I don't recall many dreams, but I'm still pretty creative.

Interesting byproduct.

When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.

I dream every night. Been that way since I was 14. And I have bipolar disorder. Guitarist, vocalist, published photographer, writer among other things. But the creativity also bled into my technical work.

I also have Closed Eye Hallucinations, which means that at night mostly when I close my eyes the light patterns turn into physical images. For a long time they were tortured faces but I see lots of things; trees, mountains, people... So my psychiatrist thoughts on this was that the brain creativity creates these images out of patterns from the light and dark when you close your eyes.