“How do you dream these ideas up?” That’s a question cartoonists often get asked, especially when the imagery of the cartoon seems more suited to dreaming than to waking. A good example appears below, a cartoon that I literally dreamt up—both image and caption.

I used this cartoon in a book I published about cartooning and creativity, “The Naked Cartoonist,” to highlight the similarities between the processes of dreaming and cartooning, pointing out that both

involve exaggeration, distortion, and chains of tangential association linked to our basic emotions and desires. These emotions and desires are often hidden from us; to unleash them we have to interact with reality, not as we do in everyday life, through our conscious activity, but in a warped way, as we do in dreams.

This analogizing piqued the interest of Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist from Harvard who has spent more than a decade researching dreams and creativity. In her book “The Committee of Sleep,” she described the contributions that dreaming had made to art, fiction, and scientific investigations, but she realized that cartooning was an area she had neglected.

She contacted me seeking to redress this grievous omission. Take it away, Deirdre:

There are not all that many funny dreams, but at least three elements of dream creativity potentially benefit cartooning: Puns—language use drops in dreams, but the sound of words plays a larger role relative to meaning. The emergence of forbidden impulses—the sex and aggression that escape sleep’s indolent censor are fuel for humor. Bizarre juxtapositions—what our dreaming mind fails to label as “not making sense” will strike our waking sensibilities as funny. In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud wrote of “visual representation”: the tendency of a verbal phrase to be represented by an image. Of Freud’s many punlike examples, the only one robust in a translation from German to English features a sexual encounter in a car interpreted as “autoeroticism.” Many of the amusing dream images I’ve encountered are literalizations of idioms—a family’s “black sheep,” an ambivalent dreamer “straddling the fence,” and another finding herself and her husband “on the rocks.” A century ago, Winsor McCay’s famous cartoon strips “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” (so named as the cheesy dish was said to produce weird dreams) illustrated idioms showing up in dreams, as in this “Rarebit” frame of a husband ending up “in the doghouse.”

The second source of humor, the covert expression of forbidden impulses—sexual, hostile, or regressively dependent—is represented by cartoonists in the “dream bubble.” Sam Cobean’s captionless nineteen-forties New Yorker cartoons are often credited as the first dream bubbles. While some of these represented daydreams, others referred to nighttime dreams, such as the one below:

The third element in dreams that strikes our waking mind as funny—bizarre juxtaposition—is at the core of the humor in this cartoon by New Yorker regular Robert Leighton, which originated in a dream.

Similarly, the New Yorker cartoonist Joe Dator says, “This cartoon appeared whole in my dream, I woke up, made a quick sketch, and went back to sleep.”

And Kaamran Hafeez, a recent addition to the ranks of New Yorker cartoonists, explained one source of inspiration: “I have, from time to time, found myself gag-writing in a dream. The ideas are often bizarre juxtapositions and the results vary widely. Recent example: woman dates her calendar.”

Bob Mankoff points out that dreams can also begin cartoons: presenting a bizarre image which intrigues the waking cartoonist enough to create a caption that ties the incongruities together and completes the joke. He describes dreaming the visual image for the cartoon below—a bizarrely placed fire alarm.

The image is somewhat amusing by itself, already tied into cartooning by the standard premise of the two castaways and the palm tree, but it became a fully formed cartoon only after Bob’s waking mind came up with the line that links the bizarre combination. This genre of incongruous juxtapositions has probably reached its apex with The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest. Bob suggests that the image-creation part of that process is what dreams do best, and I think that is likely. The same neurological quirk that makes our dreaming minds creative—our restrained prefrontal cortex—also means that we don’t recognize as easily that such juxtapositions need explaining. The prefrontal area is also engaged when appreciating humor, so we may not “get the joke” as easily while dreaming. However, as the hair cartoon and pun examples illustrate, dreams can certainly generate funny phrasing. In my research, I’ve found that people are especially likely to dream solutions to any problem they “incubate,” or think about at bedtime and ask their dreaming mind to target. I’ve worked with scientists and artists seeking practical help from their dreams and with college students trying to solve brainteasers or just their homework—and a significant percentage of each have made breakthroughs after incubating the problem at bedtime. I’d like to suggest that a Caption Contest enthusiasts try this. Below are my standard dream-incubation instructions, modified slightly to apply to the contest. I’d love to hear your results. Place the cartoon to be captioned by your bed. Review the cartoon image for a few minutes just before going to bed. Once in bed, visualize the cartoon image in your mind’s eye. Tell yourself you want to dream a caption just as you are drifting off to sleep. Keeping a pen and paper—perhaps also a flashlight or pen with a lit tip—on the night table. Upon awakening, lie quietly before getting out of bed. Note whether there is any trace of a dream, and invite more of the dream to return if possible. Write it down.

P.S. from Bob:

Here’s the image for this week’s Caption Contest:

[#image: /photos/59095403c14b3c606c1043d2]

Here’s hoping it will provide an excellent stimulus for your nocturnal noodling. Just click on it, and it will take you to the Caption Contest entry page. In order for us to collect all the dreamt captions most efficiently, please precede your caption entry with “#dream.”