Creative Dreamer

Articles

Insights as profound as those gained by some of history's most famous dreamers are available to anyone willing to put attention on developing this powerful faculty. Part 1 of a 3-part series. Illustrations by Scott Byers
Creative Dreamer

By JAMES CORONATO
Aegis Press

In 1919 Nikola Tesla wrote:
"For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms. It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life. Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast." ^[1]
Here was a man who for forty years, almost without rest, drank ceaselessly from his own creative wellspring to bring the world an avalanche of discoveries that even today form the basis of much of our technological society.
What is it that gives a man the power to create, and the unrelenting ability to bring forth his creations into the world? What is it that individuals like da Vinci, Newton, Tesla, Edison, Fuller, and other great creative geniuses have had that others seem to lack? And what exactly is creativity itself?
Some researchers are looking for the source of creativity in the organic processes of the brain, but creativity is far more fundamental than that; it is as basic a function of the human being as desire or thought, and arguably more valuable. Yet although it is responsible for most of what we are, who among us truly understands all the facets in our being that creativity affects, or what is even more important, how to inspire creativity in ourselves and in those around us? In probing this question, scientists are only beginning to deduce what

"A proponent of Platonism, which holds that mental objects exist independently of the thinker..."

philosophers and mystics have held for a thousand years; namely, that the highest forms of creativity arise from an ability to tap into a source of ideals that pull rather than push an individual to heights of achievement. Such is the difference between love and power.
Records of individual efforts to increase personal creativity are not difficult to find in the literature. Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi, often called the "Father of the Atomic Age," once related how as a child he resolved to spend an hour a day visualizing "impossible" or fantastic possibilities. His creativity in seeing novel solutions later became legendary among his peers, particularly during such times of intense and motivated activity as the Manhattan Project. Fermi and others like him were able to find ways to enhance their personal creativity that gave them the vision and energy to succeed where others failed.
What few realize, however, is that it is equally as easy for anyone to construct exercise and solution techniques that may be applied successfully to any problem, at any time. Although creativity is perhaps the most individual thing we can do, it is also the most universal function of the human spirit, and our creative powers may be strengthened, even as our logical faculty can be honed by solving brain teasers or crossword puzzles. The creative faculty we work to develop is our intuition. It is here that the roots and foundation of creativity lie, and here that anyone with an adventuresome spirit can acquire the same faculties and methods used by the great people of history, and deploy them in a systematic way.
Intuitive Wisdom
Well, what is this faculty we call intuition, and how do we use it to solve the problems we encounter in everyday life?
To most of us, intuition is either something you have or something you don't—a mysterious and awesome power which sets apart the Curies and the Edisons from the rest of the race, who often struggle against problems far more mundane than those with which the titans of history have wrestled.
Further, while our intuitive wisdom can be one of the deepest (or loftiest) characteristics of our thought, it remains a paradox that its apparent source, the unconscious mind, is also the seat of some of our basest and most primal instinctual desires. Here, the apparent contradiction offers a clue to the intuition's agility: having at its deepest level no social conscience to tell us right from wrong, the mind is unconstrained by logic and convention. That freedom is what enables the beauty and elegance of what it presents us, for its solutions are unfettered by the shopworn rules of form to which our conscious minds adhere.
Records of scientific achievement reveal that for many scientists, finding solutions to their inquiries has at some point involved the experience of knowing suddenly that they possessed the answer, often before they had even seen it themselves. Not to be confused with the usual confidence they had in their innate abilities to solve problems, this sensation, this clarity of knowingness, came with feelings of excitement and satisfaction at the instant when things opened up and they touched what it was they were looking for.
It is an interesting consequence of nature's reciprocity that the sequence of discovery and feeling can be turned around to create a powerful method of yielding insights: by simulating, and holding, the feeling of having already reached the solution to a problem, you can move yourself into a region of awareness where that answer is the reality for you. That is, you move your own reality into the sphere of reality of that which you seek.
Mathematician Kurt Gödel once described how he did this. A proponent of Platonism, which holds that mental objects exist independently of the thinker, he invited others to prove to themselves that they could experience directly the mathematical objects of which he spoke. His instructions were simple: relax—for example by lying down in a dark and quiet place—close off the senses (by withdrawing attention from them), and actively seek with the mind. He cautioned to not let the mind be limited by its experience of everyday reality, maintaining that one can directly perceive such things as infinite quantities, contrary to what we normally find around us.
Seeking by Dreaming
But there are many ways of seeking, and we do not necessarily need to live (a la Gödel) in a darkened office with a couch to find our ideas. After all, we do this after a fashion every night when we go to bed. We dream.
Abraham Lincoln used to dream about important battles during the Civil War; the Roman orator Cicero had waking visions of Caesar's demise; and Friedrich Kekule´ von Stradonitz discovered the structure of the benzene ring in his sleep. Dreaming can teach us a great deal of ourselves and the world, regardless of whether it is done while awake or while sleeping. The object is to put to work that part of us that dreams to produce useful results.
Both daydreams and night dreams (which have provided more than one inventor with his solutions), are powerful tools for resolving complex scientific issues by cutting directly to their essence. For example, an overview can provide the key to solving an intricate problem even though it often is very difficult to do, especially when dealing with a large body of information. Overviews are the forte of our dreaming selves, however, and they can help us analyze a situation into its various components, or synthesize a solution out of the pieces of our understanding.
Like our personalities, though, our dreaming selves have feelings too, and until you take them seriously, they sit dejected at their desks, head propped on one hand, doodling aimlessly and getting remarkably little accomplished. But begin to notice them, ask them for advice on a problem, and they brighten immediately at the chance to help and begin sending you information of a character and accuracy that you can get from no other source, and in a language all your own.
It does not matter if you feel you do not dream, or that you cannot remember your dreams; it is enough to let them know you are open to suggestion. As soon as you do, changes begin to take place in the procedure that gets them from the dreamer's domain out into the open so you can see them. The art is not so much in having dreams as it is in putting them to work for you in a meaningful way.
You can start by keeping a pad and pencil or a small tape recorder next to your bed. When you awaken in the morning or during the night, record whatever comes into your mind. It can be anything at all. The nether land of awareness between waking and sleeping, when we are drifting into sleep or sliding toward the awakened state, is the time when we are

"...you signal your dreaming self to get serious—you have work to do."

most open to the truths we are trying to access, and most able to understand them. Make the commitment to pay attention to your dreams by beginning to record them, and you signal the unconscious mind to begin to open up, and your dreaming self to get serious—you have work to do! You may not get what you're looking for immediately—like jump-starting an old motor, it may take some time to get things working smoothly—but with a little patience you will be surprised at the insights you get.
Once you have gotten your own attention, the next step is to dream with a purpose. In the dream state, you have access to an infinite breadth of knowledge and wisdom, and your dreams can give you infallible advice every time if you learn how to read them, and how to ask for what you want. A good way to start is by stating explicitly what is to happen when you lie down and change worlds. By writing down a series of postulates, you construct a context for your dreams to occur in, and a concrete framework for your subconscious to follow in communicating the information to your waking mind.

Dream Exercises
It is the unconscious mind one trains in order to dream more effectively, because that is what takes control when we relax, and relinquish our waking attention to the dream state. What we actually are doing is strengthening the connection between our unconscious and conscious awarenesses so that we become progressively less unconscious. Ultimately, we seek to be as conscious in our dream state as we are in the office (perhaps more so). It is said that the mastery of attention one acquires in the process yields a depth and richness to life that can only be hinted at. Here is where we can begin to build our universe from the ground up the way we want it to be, for we live our dreams, whether we are conscious of them or not.
The postulates you write before bed are a series of commands or acknowledgments about what you want—and expect—to happen in the course of your dreaming. Write them in the first person as if the actions are already a current habit or an accepted fact. It is important to bring your unconscious expectations into the present since your subconscious mind would be content to remain always in a state of becoming, whereas you want the learning to take place now. You can include the steps you will follow in falling asleep, in what you are to accomplish in your dreams, in how and when you will wake up, and in what you will do when you wake up.
You might try the following simple outline to start:
1. When my physical body falls asleep, I remain awake in my dreaming self and slip easily into a conscious awareness of my dreams;
2. I then have dreams that give me insights about the problem(s) on which I am working;
3. After each experience I awaken physically and record all the important details of the dream.
4. By the morning I will have found the solution to: (state the problem explicitly).
In contemporary neuropsychology it is commonplace for athletes to train themselves by simulating their motions beforehand in their minds. In this way a basketball player, for example, will condition himself at all levels to accept the motions and feelings of successfully shooting a free throw. A classic illustration is furnished by a story told about golfer Arnold Palmer who, when asked by an interviewer about his success, related how he would walk the golf course before a match, and repeatedly putt each green with an imaginary ball, visualizing how it looked and felt each time he would make the putt on that green.
So, like a basketball player practicing free throws in his mind or a golfer putting his game beforehand, perform your list of instructions in your imagination a few times, seeing yourself completing each step. Feel how it is to have accomplished them, one by one, as you gently work the cycle into your awareness. Then drift off to sleep with pleasant feelings of happiness, warmth, and satisfaction that you have been successful. The feelings of happiness and love can be elicited by imagining a pleasant memory or experience, and are vital to the success of your dream explorations. You will find that love sets you free to reach into those areas in which your problems are solved most elegantly, for there is no prison like fear and anger, and no greater freedom than the joy of creation.

[1] Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. (Hart Brothers: Williston, VT, 1982) p. 65.

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