Creativity and Dreams

In real life this painting, "Family of Saltimbanques," by Picasso, done in 1905, is huge. On my last visit to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I stood before it for a long time, and now, too, when I see it in miniature, on the display of my computer, I can barely take my eyes off it, though I want to write something about it.
The painting has been on my mind because I might be giving a paper on "Translating Creativity," if my proposal is approved, at an upcoming professional convention, so I've been wondering how one recognizes creativity in the first place. To me, this painting is a, so extreme, indeed, that comment seems superfluousn extreme demonstration of artistic creativity, from which one can learn almost everything one needs to know about it.
We are most creative in our dreams, and this painting has a dreamlike quality: six figures are placed in a non-landscape, A fat middle-aged man in a reddish costume looks at a tall young man, dressed in a harlequin costume, who stands with his left hand behind his back and looks away from the man in red. A young girl in a ballet costume stands at the younger man's right, looking down and away from him. A boy, wearing only a bathing suit, approaches, carrying a barrel on his shoulder. He is almost in the center of the painting, but stands a bit behind the fat man. Another boy, younger, wearing a turquoise jacket, open at the neck, stands in a kind of dancer's pose, and, in the lower right corner of the painting, looking away from the five other people, sits a young woman in straw hat, whose gaze is also turned away from ours.
Who are these people? What is the connection between them? How did they get there? What are they doing? Where are they going? The painting only raises questions. Yet, despite all the unexplained things, Picasso used items of visual vocabulary that ordinarily mean something to us: costumes, poses, facial expressions, recognizable objects (a basket of flowers, a jug, a cask), a kind of landscape. These figures probably had personal meaning for Picasso, and they are meant to have personal meaning for the spectator as well, personally meaning that Picasso didn't state explicitly (that's part of what's dreamlike about the painting): parents and children (perhaps), youth and maturity, the impossibility of communication among people in their own worlds? We are invited to project our own issues on these figures.
Picasso was well-versed in the history of painting, and he must have thought, for example, of Watteau, whose painting of these "Italian comedians" is nearly as mysterious as Picasso's painting. What is the meaning of the statue behind the figures in the upper right of the painting? Why are these five actors standing where they are? (Five, because the face of a black man peers out between the left shoulder of the Pierrot figure and the musician who is bending over).
Watteau's comedians are dressed in recognizable costumes, like Picasso's saltimbanques. The dream is not entirely incoherent, the way some of my dreams are, but the choice of the figures, their pose, their situation all obey a dream-logic.
Dreams are notoriously difficult to remember, which may be why we need art: to evoke our dreams, or even to replace them.
As I meditate on these paintings and write about them, the city of Paris is reeling from cruel terrorist attacks that have left more than a hundred people dead, well-planned attacks that are, in their way, also a demonstration of creativity, also the acting out of a dream-logic.
I'm not sure what to do with that idea.