the half-cooked ideas of a slumbering thirty something
I always wondered why some of my best ideas come to me when I'm half asleep
I love to write stories. Whenever a finish one, even if I don’t love it as much as I might have hoped when I set pen to paper or typed the first word, I’ll still get this intense sense of achievement. Like most of us who are unwillingly devoted to keep late capitalism going, I’m often too busy to allow myself that kind of enjoyment, and because my job involves writing, whenever I sit down to write a story, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of guilt that I should probably be working on one of my several articles under deadline.
I get ideas that I abandon halfway through the process of developing them. I often lack the time to properly allow myself to get into it and away from everything else.
I’ve also found that I often get my best ideas when I'm half-asleep: not quite there yet, but certainly not fully awake. When that happens - usually in nights where I’ll have to wake up at 6 a.m. the following day to give a lecture on Chaucerto kids who by all means would have chosen their beds rather than the busy commute to campus - I'm consumed by an acute panic: should I write this down, maybe in my notes app even, or should I just let go because I certainly won’t have forgotten this brilliant, life-changing idea by tomorrow morning?
Of course, I never remember it the next morning. Even when I do write it down, I’m often surprised by what it says like I’d never seen it before. So what is that about?
I was recently talking to a friend about this and she told me that she once read a Keith Richards interview where he related that some of the Stones’ most iconic riffs came to him when he was asleep. He would wake up in the middle of the night and make sure to record whatever idea came to him. I looked it up and it’s true: the riff of “(I can get no) Satisfaction” came to him in a dream.
I’m not suggesting my short stories are anywhere as relevant to the culture as Keith Richards’s riffs, but this does fascinate me in a way. Where do our minds go to gain access to or shape some of our best ideas?
In this BBC Science Focus article, Alice Gregory cites both Mary Shelley and Salvador Dalí as examples of artists who created masterpieces in “the transition from wakefulness to sleep”, a state called the “hypnagogic state”. Beyond the anecdotic evidences, there are actual scientific studies into this, with researchers at the Paris Brain Institute, and the sleep pathology department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris conducting an experiment that resulted in this article:
Participants (N = 103) were exposed to mathematical problems without knowing that a hidden rule allowed solving them almost instantly. We found that spending at least 15 s in N1 during a resting period tripled the chance to discover the hidden rule (83% versus 30% when participants remained awake), and this effect vanished if subjects reached deeper sleep. Our findings suggest that there is a creative sweet spot within the sleep-onset period, and hitting it requires individuals balancing falling asleep easily against falling asleep too deeply.
The reason I’m pursuing this is to try to make sense of just how much our creativity and ability to think outside the box might be hampered by day-to-day routine and by how excessively busy we all are at all times. Even this magical space between sleep and wakefulness is one we have to allow ourselves to experience: as I said, I’ve lost many story ideas simply because I was afraid that if I made myself write it down, I wouldn’t manage to fall asleep again.
Creativity is not just about claiming a freedom to create despite the rush of everyday life and the feeling that maybe it doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It is also a conscious choice to prioritise this part of yourself over others, even if it might cost feeling energised and alert the following day.
What about you? Are you at your most creative just before you fall asleep? What do you do about that?
ah, adorei o nome do Substack, claro
Eu tenho um grupo só comigo no what's app que fico escrevendo ideias lá - ele é um caos, tem pedaço de letra de música, ideias para histórias, ideias para pesquisas. Esses pensamentos vem em momentos que to distraído, dormindo acontece bastante, até em sonho, mas também esperando ônibus, observando as coisas acontecerem na rua. É interessante que quando eu evito o celular, fico marejando no tédio, essas ideias vem também. Parece que tudo que a gente consome fica no fundo da mente, e aí do nada decidem subir, aleatoriamente, e estranhamente fazem sentido - did I just paraphrase Freud?. anyway kkkk Eu acho essa reflexão maravilhosa, amei muito o texto, ansioso para os próximos!