Creativity and Dreams

The most creative moments in our lives are dreams, and there is a strong connection between art and dreaming. For me, the best part of art is the inexplicable part, as in this famous, enigmatic painting by Picasso, where the figures appear to be floating in a dream.

A while back I proposed giving a talk entitled "Translating Creativity" at the annual translators' conference in Jerusalem, but we were going to be in India when the conference was held, so I withdrew my proposal. But I'm still deeply interested in the topic.
When I was taking clarinet lessons in high school, my teacher, Irving Neidich, told me that the greatest music is that which surprises you every time you hear it, which makes sense. How else could a soloist play the same piece time and time again and not be bored and not bore her listeners? Only because she discovers something new in the piece every time she plays it.
I did a brief search for "creativity" on the Internet and ran across a "creativity test," which, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I took. It turns out my creativity is significantly lower than average. Troubled by that result, I took another look at some of the statues I have made, and I realized that the people who designed the test had a rather different idea of creativity in their mind.

It was fairly dumb of me to bother taking that test, when our house is full of concrete evidence of my creativity.
If I ever get around to writing that paper on "Translating Creativity," it would have to begin with a section on recognizing creativity. And, since you can't recognize something you can't define, I'd have to define it.
And that would bring me back to the subject of dreams, which are undeniably creative. If you look up "dreams" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of articles about "How to Harness Your Dreams" to succeed and make a lot of money. I'm not interested either in that or in dreams as a key to one's personality. I'm interested in the feeling you have when you dream: you are in an invented world, which you invented, and things happen arbitrarily there. However, you accept those events as if they were ordinary. A person you haven't thought of for years shows up in your dream, but he or she doesn't look at all the way they did in real life - but you know who they are! You also find yourself in inexplicable situations. In my anxiety dreams I discover I had been supposed to teach a college course in calculus and forgotten about it, aside from the fact that I've never studied calculus and could not more teach it than I could teach Sumerian.
Recently we heard performances of Beethoven string quartets. In a way, the late ones are like a stream of consciousness, the volatile flow of moods, as in a dream. Obviously Beethoven didn't record his moods in real time. But he remembered the flow and put it in musical form, highly complex, carefully planned, but sounding spontaneous.