Many people associate strange, colorful and exotic dreams with creative ability. Katie, 12, told us about one dream she had: "I was writing a play and I couldn't think of an ending, but then I dreamed I sat down and talked to the main character and she told me what to do."

Over the centuries, lots of artists, writers, and musicians have been influenced by their dreams, and many say they dreamed up their greatest works while asleep, quickly putting them down on paper after waking up.

• The Beatles' "Yesterday" is one of the best-selling and most popular songs ever written, and songwriter Paul McCartney claims that the melody came to him in a dream. When he woke up, he originally used the lyric "scrambled eggs" to fit the tune, but he later changed it to "yesterday," and the rest is pop music history.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a world famous poet, claimed that he dreamed every word of his great poem "Kubla Khan" while he was asleep. When he woke up, he says, he tried to scribble down the poem as fast as he could before forgetting, but a visitor distracted him, and he could only remember part of what he dreamed.

If you have strange or beautiful dreams that inspire you to express yourself creatively, you might want to keep a dream journal or a tape recorder by your bed at night. This way, when you wake up with the dream still fresh in your mind, you can get the details down and then use them to make your drawing, story, song, dance or play later on. Dreams can be a constant source of ideas for creative people, and it's fun to try to capture dreams in a way that other people can enjoy them.

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