(SM) I'm not convinced about creativity in dreams. I think most of the stuff is already there from previous life experiences, even the most trivial things, and they just get mis-associated. I have had rather vivid dreams but they are based on an enhancement or exaggeration of a reality I have experienced plus some imagination. They wake you up which can be briefly disturbing but whatever you do you cannot recreate that dream, be it nice or nasty, and it fades remarkably quickly. Alcohol has little effect - it's a small molecule that fits anywhere. A work colleague (a chemist) said it goes round the brain pulling out a few plugs.

[Creativity - yebbut stitching material together in new and unexpected ways is what creativity is. The amount of creativity in different people's dreams may vary, but from what I can tell it easily matches and frequently exceeds the degree of creativity the same person can achieve when awake. Although I will concede a Captain Scarlet level of plot holes, for sure.]

The idea that creativity is a matter of becoming unshackled, freed from restraint, when we would all be massively creative if only we could let go, is bollocks. Discuss.

No art without craft, but try saying that in an art college these days.

I never said dreaming was unshackled creativity. It has at least one inescapable limit - the highly-connected blob of meat in charge of the whole mess.

Or in the words of Humph, "The teams can say any word they want, limited only by their own imaginations.
... It's stiff, that rule."