The Creative Sweet Spot of Dreaming
George Church looks like he needs a nap. I’m talking to him on Zoom, and his eyelids have grown heavy, inclining toward slumber. Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. He assures me he is wide awake. But sleeping and waking life are often blurred for Church. One of the world’s most imaginative scientists, Church is a narcoleptic.
A rare disorder, narcolepsy causes sudden attacks of sleep, and Church has fallen asleep in some unfortunate circumstances—at The World Economic Forum, just a few feet away from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for instance. He also had to give up driving due to the risk that a bout of sleepiness will strike while he is behind the wheel. But Church, a Harvard geneticist known for his pathbreaking contributions to numerous fields—from genetics to astrobiology to biomedicine—says the benefits of his condition outweigh the inconveniences. Many of his wildest and most prescient ideas come from his narcoleptic naps.
“The fact is, I fall asleep several times a day, and so almost everything comes from there,” Church says. His idea for a quick and simple way to —which resulted in the first commercial genome sequence, of the human pathogen —came from a narcoleptic nap. He also conceived of editing genomes with a method analogous to , and building new genomes with , during narcoleptic naps. More recently, in December, a for a space probe that could reach distant stars within just 20 years, at one-fifth the speed of light, came to him after a narcoleptic nap. He that these lightning-speed interstellar missions could be launched by microbes and powered by laser sails. The ideas that come to him are often the result of collisions of
