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The
song Yesterday came to Paul McCartney in his sleep. Jasper
Johns' flag paintings came to him in a dream. The opening notes
to a song woke Keith Richards up in the middle of the night.
He got up and tape-recorded the beginning to I Can't Get No
Satisfaction.
The
ending to Isabelle Allende's novel House of the Spirits came
to her in a dream. Sue Grafton explained, "I reach a point in many
of my books where I have a problem I can't solve, so as I go to
sleep I give myself the suggestion that a solution will come. When
I wake up the solution will be there." After writing seven hundred
pages of It and not knowing where the novel was going, Stephen
King had the conclusion come to him in his sleep.
It will
not surprise you to learn that your brain works while you sleep,
that it dreams, thinks and creates. You've already had the experience
of creating your novel, painting or song while you slept; of finding
the right word, the right plot twist, the right image while you
were in the land of nod. The idea of sleep creating is not new
to you.
However,
what may surprise you is that you can cultivate and improve your
natural ability to sleep create. Not only will you solve creative
problems more easily but you will enter into a routine that dramatically
increases both the quality and quantity of your creative efforts.
You double or triple the hours you currently create when you sleep
create.
In
Sleep Thinking, my latest book, I outline an eighteen-step
program for fashioning this new routine. If you follow the steps
of the Sleep Thinking Program, within a week you will find yourself
more productive and more creative. You may not think that something
as simple as learning to sleep create could make a giant difference
in your creative life. But you would be wrong.
What
you are doing by following the apparently simple steps of the Sleep
Thinking Program is moving your creative efforts to the top of your
internal to-do list, catapulting them over the other matters that
clutter our mind. This is a profound change guaranteed to increase
your output and deepen your art.
What
did you think about when you went to bed last night? If you are
like most people, you stewed about the day's events, replayed an
unpleasant conversation from work, or began dreading what tomorrow
would bring. Maybe you lay there, restive and unable to sleep,
listening to your lover snore. But there are far better things
to do with that time than stew and worry. The very best thing is
to ready yourself for a night's worth of creating.
As soon
as you crawl into bed, start thinking about your current creative
project. Give your brain a real invitation to think. If you do,
your brain will take sleep as its opportunity to make all the necessary
connections. You'll drift off and sleep like a baby. When you
wake up, head straight to your current creative project, so as to
make the best use of your night efforts.
Just
wondering (and not worrying) about your current project as you drift
off to sleep is the best way to enlist your brain. But you may
feel blocked or you may not be working on a project right now.
In that case, the following are some good sleeping thinking questions
to get you started. Choose any one of them of them as a portal
into sleep creating.
1. What do I want to create?
2. What is my deepest creative project?
3. What is waiting to be born?
4. What piece do I want to return to?
5. What new project do I want to launch?
The
following are two brief examples of how the Sleep Thinking Program
can help with your creative life.
Joyce,
a second generation Chinese-American, had gotten her undergraduate
degree in economics and an MBA after that. For twenty-five years
she'd worked in corporate America in increasingly demanding jobs,
while at the same time marrying and bringing two children into the
world. But when her aunt was diagnosed with colon cancer in her
early seventies and her mother was diagnosed with the same cancer
shortly thereafter, something in Joyce snapped. It no longer made
sense to her to just push herself, her husband, and her children
as if nothing mattered but achievement.
But
she didn't know what else she should do. She began sleep thinking
on the question, "What would a more meaningful life look like?"
One morning she awoke and knew that she had to make a documentary
film about the women of her mother's generation, the Chinese women
in their eighties and nineties who had grown up in China and about
whom she knew next to nothing.
She
knew that her pursuit of the American Dream had something to do
with her feelings about these women, what they stood for and what
they demanded of their children, and that she had to come to terms
with her feelings while these women were still alive. To honor
her realization, Joyce began a journey into filmmaking, oral history,
and the hidden recesses of her own psyche that culminated in a film that
she never knew she had it in her to create.
Loretta
was a young woman who hated making mistakes. She had grown up with
critical parents who made her feel worthless whenever she displeased
them, which, since nothing could ever be done to their liking, was
all the time. If she played a piano piece decently at recital they
could only comment on the way she had slouched, how shy she had
seemed, or on how much better they had expected her to play, considering
all the lessons she had taken. Loretta could do nothing right.
The
upshot of their meanness was to ruin her ability to freely make
mistakes. She still made mistakes, since we all do, but she hated
them and tried to hide them from herself and from everyone else.
But she couldn't really hide them and ended up chastising herself
and saying things like "Only a champion idiot like me could make
these many mistakes."
Finally
she realized that she had to change her attitude, since her fear
of mistakes was ruining her ability to write papers in her graduate
psychology program. Because she felt that each paper had to be
perfect, she couldn't start them. Then, at the last minute, she
would grind something out, but what she turned out was never as
good what she might have written if she had felt free to write multiple
drafts.
Desperate,
she began to sleep think, choosing the following statement as her
nighttime prompt: "I am so scared of mistakes." About the third
or fourth night she had a dream about mud. It wasn't just any mud.
It was the kind of mud you make when you mix too many pigments together.
It was painter's mud. What she saw in the dream was a happy child
obliviously mixing too many colors together, making a face at the
mud she produced, and blithely starting over.
The
child in the dream just didn't care that she had wasted some paint.
It simply wasn't a tragedy or an issue at all. No word like "mistake",
"failure", "stupid", "wasteful", or "incompetent" even crossed the
little girl's mind. She had simply made some mud and now needed
to discard it. Loretta made the pledge to herself that she would
learn to become like the girl and woman she might have been if she
hadn't received so much disabling criticism. Her mantra became
"mud means nothing."
I hope
you will try out the Sleep Thinking Program to help with your creative
life. D. H. Lawrence explained that: "sleep seems to hammer out
for me the logical conclusions of my vague days." Art Spiegelman
described how he handled problems while writing Maus: "If
I go to sleep laying out the day's problem to myself and let those
be my last conscious thoughts, I'll more or less consistently wake
up with a solution." When you get in the habit of sleep creating,
your creative efforts will reach new heights.
Copyright
© 2001 Eric Maisel. All Rights Reserved.
Eric Maisel is the author of Fearless Creating, The Creativity
Book, Deep Writing, A Life in the Arts, and many other books
for creators. His latest book is Sleep Thinking: The Revolutionary
Program That Helps You Solve Problems, Reduce Stress, and Increase
Creativity While You Sleep. It is available at Maisel's two
web sites, http://www.sleepthinking.com
and http://ericmaisel.com
or wherever books are sold.
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