Writing and Dreaming

I’m not a morning person in any sense. I stagger around for a while, lucky if I can manage to feed the pets and make some tea. Then I sit down at the computer. Even though I’m still groggy and half-functional, amazingly, I can write. In fact, it’s my best writing time. I believe it’s because the creative part of writing is like a continuation of the dream state. Dreaming—that amorphous under-realm of thoughts, images, memories and feelings. Dreams have no logic, reason or sense of time or place. Every night we spend hours in this fantastical world and remember only tiny glimpses of it. But I believe this seething maelstrom of connections and ideas is the source of my creativity. In the morning when I first awake, I’m better able to access that world because I’ve just left it.

Most children are amazingly creative, but as they grow up, they are forced to focus on things in the outer world. (“Stop daydreaming and pay attention!”) The connection between that creative underworld of their imagination and their conscious self withers away or is repressed. For whatever reason, writers keep that connection. Sometimes they lose it for a while, then when they’re older, it seeps back into their conscious thoughts, reminding them it’s there. And they once again begin to seek out that swirling vortex of thoughts and feelings beneath their outer persona. As writers, we have to connect to that part of ourselves and use it, or we will never be happy.

As a “non-plotter”, I use the power of the creative unconscious all the time. I often mull over my story and try to figure out where it’s going before I go to sleep, as well as when I wake up (either in the morning or, alas, in the middle of the night). In those hazy, half-awake periods, I often find the direction I need to write myself out of the corner I’ve written myself into. Plot ideas come to me and the story begins to fall into place.

Even while I’m wide awake, the whirring maelstrom of ideas and images simmering below my normal awareness sometimes breaks through with an idea or thought about my current work-in-progress. Out of the blue, I get that epiphany, which often has little to do with what’s happening in the real world around me. I believe this under-realm is the source of all the really good stuff, the magical moments in the writing process when everything flows and fits together, the essence of storytelling.

But because that part of your brain is not under your conscious control, it can be fickle and elusive. Too much stress in your life can create a kind of static that interferes with your connection to that well of ideas and images. Or, it can exhaust you to the point where your unconscious can only focus on the absolute essentials and has nothing left for creativity.

Scientists have a new theory about why we sleep: that we sleep to forget. During good REM sleep, our brain is actually trimming back synapses, getting rid of data we don’t need, the stuff that just clutters up our brains and makes it hard to remember the important things. If you’re under great stress, your unconscious is so overwhelmed with the cascade of emotional responses and thoughts that it gets overloaded. It probably starts paring away synapses randomly. In fact, I’m certain it does. When I’m under great stress, my mind goes blank, as I lose synapses and memories I actually need to function.

The unconscious is always messy and turbulent. But when we are struggling to deal with problems and issues in the outer world, it becomes so chaotic and disordered that creating becomes difficult. But sometimes we can reverse the process and make the magic go the other way. In the act of writing, we can calm our unconscious self and allow it to reach a kind of equilibrium.

Many writing books, classes and forms of writing instruction concentrate on organization, plotting and structure. And those are important. Our books can’t be like dreams. They have to make sense and generally have a logical order. But maybe as we learn more about the mind and about dreams, we can find better ways to access the magic that lies beneath our conscious mind and use it to enhance our writing.