The Beatles’ song "Yesterday" was written in what psychologists refer to as the “hypnagogic state.” This is the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, when we drowsily linger in a semi-conscious state, experiencing vivid mental images and sounds.

Waking up one morning in early 1965, Paul McCartney became aware of a long complex melody playing inside his head. He jumped straight out of bed, sat down at his piano, and picked out the melody on the keys. He quickly found the chords to go with the melody and created some holding phrases (as songwriters call them, before they write proper lyrics) to fit the melody.

Finding it difficult to believe that such a beautiful melody could emerge spontaneously, McCartney suspected that he was subconsciously plagiarizing another composition. As he recalled, “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before … I thought if no one claimed after a few weeks, then I could have it.”1 But it turned out to be original.

Many great discoveries and inventions have emerged from the hypnagogic state. The physicist Niels Bohr effectively won the Nobel Prize while semi-conscious. Drifting off to sleep, he dreamt he saw the nucleus of the atom, with the electrons spinning around it, just like the solar system with the sun and planets—and in this way he “discovered” the structure of the atom.

Research has shown that the hypnagogic state is a creative “sweet spot.” For example, in a 2021 study, participants in a hypnagogic state were three times more likely to discover the “hidden rule” that could solve a mathematical problem.

Psychologists associate creativity........

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