I woke up in the middle of the night with a perfect idea for something to blog about today. It was brilliant, urgent and I knew just how to approach it. It was so perfect in fact, that I closed my eyes and went back to sleep, ignoring the fact that I had a pencil and paper on the bedside table. Needless to say when I woke up this morning I had not the faintest glimmer of what I was supposed to blog about.
It might come back again, during the day, with a sort of back-of-the-head clap of thunder that makes you sit up and go “Oh, but of course. How could I have forgotten that?” Or it may never return. And it may be a good idea. Or, had I actually made notes, this morning I might have found out the notes said “Hats for horses and chocolate ice cream.”
In that, sleep is like drug-experiences. Yes, I DO have personal experience of those, thanks to being put on morphine post-giving-birth (I wrote Thirst!) and having injured myself severely enough a few times to be put on vicodin. For the record, I’d rather endure any amount of pain even just below intolerable than actually take the stuff. First, because I hate the feeling that I can’t control my own mind, and second because – being raised in SF – as my impressions of my surroundings become more disjointed I’m afraid of stepping through into some other reality. Yeah, I am probably insane. Call it personal deformation. Frankly I never understood why any of my colleagues would want – much less need – drugs. “Such things have I in mind…” Yeah.
Anyway, actually I do understand why people would want to write while on drugs – or sleep deprived. No, chill. I will not start doping to write. Remember, I hate to be out of control of my own mind. I’m more likely to do it on sleep deprivation, anyway. (Sleep? What that?)
Okay, let me explain. What I experienced last night is neither unusual nor particular to me. I’m sure all of you have experienced it, if not with writing with something else. You’ll fight and struggle through a problem in your wakening life, and then in the middle of the night you suddenly realize that it’s all about the drive shaft, after all. Or the needles need to be made out of platinum. Or that pleat in the back side needs to be in the center. Or the whole point of the plot is that he can’t find the gun.
This is why creative people often keep a pad by the bed side.
I don’t usually because I’ve found that the good insights stay with me. You could say I trained my mind to be a note pad. This time I had the pad by the bedside, because I’ve been recasting some old short stories and was making notes on those before falling asleep. I do have a pad in my purse or – usually – my jeans pocket, because, in this household, table conversation or car conversation can suddenly yield a story beginning or the germ of a story idea.
But I know both why people do this and why some people resort to drugs to write. It’s because the story world we create is not complete if its all created with logic and in the forebrain. That’s because the world isn’t like that.
I’ve decried the idea that we should write reality often enough, that I’m sure I don’t need to tell you now that’s not what I’m advocating. What we create, as storytellers, is not reality. We don’t even hold a mirror to reality. No, what we create is a lucid dream state for our readers. (Okay, some writers just create clever puzzles. But even with Agatha Christie, whom I’ve heard accused of that, that’s not why I read her.)
For one, the world we create is logical. Reality isn’t. No, let me rephrase that. Reality is logical but it has a huge slab of whimsy dropped in for good and ill. That is because from you one point of view, you can’t know what everyone else in this huge world is doing. If you could and you could compute it, you’d see it was all action/consequence, from the butterfly flapping its wings in India to the hurricane in Florida. Or so I’m told at least. The point is that no human being can do that.
By focusing on a smaller slice of reality, a writer can simulate that and satisfy the reader’s need for the action-consequence sequence.
Except… Except that it’s not that easy. Because we are used to real life, while we like the stories, they don’t feel quite right without at least one explained element or sequence. It can’t be a Deus ex machina one. Or if it is, it can’t feel like one. It can’t solve all the character’s problems. If it did, it would be no fun. It should be only one incident/element/sequence. AND it must remain unexplained.
What I’m thinking of here, specifically, is the Starman Jones episode where … Was he guided by the dead navigator? Or was he doing it all himself and his “feeling” was just a safety blanket?
I have a similar sequence in A Few Good Men. It could honestly go either way. The point is that at that point you have to drive the character to such an extreme state that the character himself isn’t sure if it’s a dream or not. (Kip, half frozen, talking to the Suit while rescuing Pewee and the Mother Thing in Have Spacesuit.)
I fought it in A Few Good Men, because I don’t like the feeling that “an unexplained episode/element” helps my character. But when I took it out, the book felt less real.
And that’s why some writers feel the need for drugs/sleep deprivation. It’s the only way they can drop in the… shall we call it “mystic element” without trying to explain it away or pin it definitely as either a psychic/magical phenomenon or just an illusion. Or, of course, they remove that element and impoverish the book.
Because even our own brain is not totally logical. As I said, when we dream, we can suddenly have brilliant insights, and they can come from things that make no sense to the waking mind. A lot of them still won’t. Say, you know “Horse hats and chocolate ice cream because lizards have legs.” BUT just as often (about half the time) you’ll find “Horse hats and chocolate ice cream. Lizards have legs. You need to center that drive shaft you moron. That’s why the engine doesn’t work as designed.” And if you had time and patience to analyze it, you’d find that your sleeping brain was in fact throwing together non-verbal impressions of how-things-work to get the insight, and that if you followed it back, with words, bit by bit, you could have the same insight… in a couple of years.
In other words, our brains don’t tell us everything they know. They can’t. They process a lot more info than we’re consciously aware of, and we short circuit them with logic and words when they try to tell us stuff. (And even this is not right, since our brains are part of us, and not some mystical creature.)
So, yeah, I get why some of colleagues need to induce an altered state, to get to that point where they can create a solid dream-world that feels real to the reader. There is a problem with using drugs to do it, though, beyond the obvious – for most of them – harmful side effects. The problem is that habitual use seems to dull/have other effects on your non-doped brain. And the only way to make the induced dream state work is to be able to step back and edit with the full rational mind. Because then you can figure out whether the weird bit of unexplained insight makes sense or it’s just “Fishnet stockings. Because lizards have legs.”
Mostly, as with most other things, I’m training myself to drop the mystical bits in while fully awake and rational – well, as rational as I am while writing, when it often seems like the WHOLE STORY is dictating itself.
And I don’t keep a pad by my bedside, because the good insights keep. And the good ideas too. And frankly I’m drowning in ideas, anyway.
As for that brilliant idea in the middle of the night? No clue. It was probably “Miller moths. Cats have teeth. Write shorter blog posts, you moron.”
According To Hoyt 
I’ve just started keeping a pad and pencil next to the bed, but honestly haven’t used it yet. Besides, I’ve got a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old running around. A pencil left out is as good as graphite on the wall.
I don’t need drugs. I have a 37 mile commute through some of the most dense traffic in the St Louis area. Soul-crushing, stupor-inducing and, yes, once and a while, crack-creating into that sublime area of the mind in which creativity resides…always just over the hill, otherwise. If I turn off the radio (currently going through Peter F Hamilton’s audiobook catalog) and just relax, ideas come unbidden.
Toward that end, I downloaded an app called Catch. It’s the driving/smartphone equivalent of having a pad and paper on the nightstand, sort of like “note to self” recorder from any number of 80’s sitcoms. The main thing is remembering to organize those random musings into usable material…after you get home, get the kids dinner, wrestle with ’em for a while, get them in and out of baths, ready for bed, in bed, then…whew.
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Graphite in the walls is the least of it. Graphite in a kid, that is something else.
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This too shall pass.
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Unfortunately not necessarily so. To her dying day mother had a strange blue black spot under her skin for graphite left when an unhelpful classmate stabbed her with a pencil. A friend’s son had a similar mark after being attacked on a school bus.
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I suspect he was assuming you meant swallowed, but I know what you mean. I had a mark like that for over 20 years in my inner thigh a couple of inches above my right knee. It was self-inflicted; I tried to catch a pencil which was rolling off my school desk by pulling my legs together, but was a little late.
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I gave myself an ink tattoo in elementary school, by carefully inking a cut on my thumb. Yeah, I was that bored.
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Can verify that, no, not necessarily. I was writing or drawing on the bus, so I had a pencil in my hand. I tripped and fell getting off and stabbed my brother in the ear. At least 15 years later and the mark is still there if you know where to look. Still feel horribly guilty about it.
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This is one problem I have with Ayn Rand. She said we were rational, I gather (no, not an expert on her ) or this was our highest virtue. My experience is that people are mostly irrational, or if they are rational, they can’t explain it.
Now, the nihilists who say the universe is irrational are wrong, wrong, wrong (and should be crushed by a Human Wave), but so is a purely deterministic view of the universe. The universe is sensible from a God’s-eye view; problem is we’re rather limited creatures. Compared to the scope of the universe, even a Vingian superintelligence tain’t much.
And I kept expecting you, in this blog post, to reccommend inducing the altered mindstate by overindulging in ice cream. Proof that I’m not wholly rational.
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Now, the nihilists who say the universe is irrational are wrong, wrong, wrong (and should be crushed by a Human Wave)
HERE, HERE! I’m already girding my loins for battle, but the plot has some issues that need ironing out.
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Rand’s characters – the little of her I’ve been able to stand the reading of – are automatons. They traverse her scenery uttering her lines without a shred of life investing in them.
Heinlein, I believe, observed that man ain’t a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. The process has a certain evolutionary logic to it: post hoc ergo proctor hoc. If the post hocced unpleasantly avoid hoccing the proctor; if the post was a good hoc, repeat the proctor. The second half of that process is especially persistent if results are (seem) consistent but not too consistent — uniformly consistent results are quickly disproven by a short period of failure, whereas intermittent results produce persisting behaviour. Speaker can elaborate on this … if he hasn’t long since.
As for the nihilists – their universe is irrational. Their problem lies in thinking they are smart enough to be able to understand a simultaneous reality through a sequential experience and their failure to so do is a fault of the universe. The see only windmills and never consider that they might be giants.
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What an image. I want my money back. A fence post hocking …? Ugh.
And, of course, you should never hoc on a proctor, he has the power to send you out of the exam.
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Saw a set of comic panels a while back. Don Quixote was charging a windmill, then drove his lance deep through the wall. Last panel, the back wall collapsed and a dead dragon fell out.
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Years and years of Oxycontin have taken their toll. My mind does tend to wander.
But in my case it does help me to deal with the constant pain.
Wayne
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Not awake enough to make a good comment.
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I have been a dreamer (able to remember many of my dreams) since I could remember at about 3 years old. I find that dreams tell me things about myself or my world that I wouldn’t know if I only listened to the logic side of my brain.
BTW I have an interesting note. When I was really sick with the disease and my doctors (and nurses) were sure that I was dying, my dreams stopped. It was a vast void that I slipped into. When I came back, it scared me some.
Cyn
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I understand the no-drugs thing. When I go under nitrous oxide at the dentist’s, the feeling of loss of control puts my mind into panic. I don’t know why I’m out of control, but I know it has to do with this thing on my nose. I start breathing through my mouth to regain control. That brings me back up to the point where I feel the pain, jolting me back to remember WHY the thing is on my nose. So then I take deep nasal breaths to compensate, and I dive deep back down. And then the cycle repeats and repeats. It doesn’t last forever, it just seems like it. It’s probably only a thousand years or so.
The only time I ever drank enough alcohol to feel any effects, I began to feel that loss of control again. That was enough! I can’t stand the taste, I can’t stand the effects, and it’s expensive. No alcohol for me!
As for dreams: I seldom remember them for very long; but I recently had one vivid dream with three scenes from a man’s life. I knew those scenes were related. They had more coherence and logic than a normal dream. When I woke up, I started writing them down, adding in details where I couldn’t remember them. The scenes included a mysterious figure, and the dream never told me who he was; but by the time I finished writing them, I knew who he was, and I knew why he was there, and my rational mind filled in the fourth and closing scene that the dream hadn’t provided. It was a perfect partnership between conscious and subsconscious.
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I am possibly the only person to be honestly able to claim enjoyment of a root canal. My dentist was setting up to do a filling but the novocaine (or equivalent thereof) wouldn’t take — he determined the cavity was too far gone and packed me off to the oral surgeon as an emergency patient. meaning I wasn’t properly on the surgeon’s schedule.
Back then I had (temporarily) lost the ability to relax in dentist’s chairs without chemical assistance, so upon arrival at the oral surgeon’s I was planted in a chair, given appropriate preliminary treatment, including the Nitrous nose cup … and promptly forgotten.
An hour and a half later I recall overhearing a semi-frantic nurse on the operating room’s phone, insisting that the oral surgeon get in there. Made no concern for me; I had long since found the proper balance of nose and mouth breathing required to maintain a happy buzz and had not yet run out of the Travis McGee novel I was reading.
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For some reason I find that alcohol does not produce quite the same effect as sedatives and pain killers do. I can experience tiddley without that horrid feeling of disconnect. Still, I hate the feeling of drunk — all the negatives of the drugs and sloppy to boot.
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Yes, same with me. I don’t like being drunk, but I’m okay with being a little “on the go”
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When I was younger (about the time I graduated high school) I experimented with drugs. I quickly found out that I hated the feeling of being out of control, especially of my mind. I absolutely would not take hallucinogens more than once and totally fail to see the allure in them. I hated downers for the ‘high’ everybody likes just made me feel stupid and out of control;except for alcohol strangely enough, which I liked entirely to much, which is why I don’t drink. Uppers on the other hand make you think you are in control, and think you are functioning better than you would without them. It took me 6-8 months to figure out that that wasn’t actually true and that they were destroying my life.
To this day I have an aversion to drugs and avoid taking even OTC ones like the plague.
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yes. Same thing here. I’ve found even little things can throw your thinking off. I mean, they found the pill changes the type of man women are attracted to. I don’t like the idea of chemical assisted thinking. I like to know it’s me in here.
I also like alcohol way too much. So I have rigid limits. Like, a beer once a week. A scotch on special occasions. A lot of Scotches on REALLY special occasions ;) I don’t count table wine because I grew up with it. That’s just “how you eat.” (Not that we drink it every meal. It’s expensive in the US.)
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I don’t count table wine because I grew up with it. That’s just “how you eat.”
Momma and Daddy were bitten by the haute cuisine cooking bug when I was very young. Momma proceeded to work her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Admittedly, we usually had those fancy steak sauces served up on ‘biftik hachet’ because of budget concerns. My father was working and attending law school when she started.
My father was a hobbyist onologist. So while my mother cooked, my father served up the wine. So for us it was also just ‘how you eat.’ From him I learned that very inexpensive good wines are available, but to scrupulously avoid cheep.
I have often entertained the idea that it was a plot on my father’s part. When I reached the stage where boys thought it worth the bother to try to ‘get me drunk’ I knew wine and was picky. Therefore I was not easy — to get drunk or, well, whatever.
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“From him I learned that very inexpensive good wines are available, but to scrupulously avoid cheep.”
I don’t know, I always thought Boone’s Farms was some of the tastiest wine made;)
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Another of Daddy’s rules: don’t drink wine that is more expensive than you can taste the difference.
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I buy a lot of Portuguese wine, on sale. It is cheap because it is little known, and I KNOW the “good” stuff, which is dragged down in price by a lot of the bad. (Let’s not talk about Mateus, okay?) So…
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Fontes verde wine. JUST get some. :) Philistine. (which is what my kid called his kindergarten class for liking spray-cheese. :-P )
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I read once that A.E. van Vogt would tuck his family into bed and then begin to write and solve story problems in a semi-sleeping state. He’d fall asleep at his desk struggling with a plot point, and awake having dreamed the solution, write it up and proceed. By the next day he’d have a story finished.
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I hate pain killers and sedatives because they go straight from nothing to create mush for brains in less than ten parsecs. You must know the feeling, the one where pushing any thoughts through is laborious and you have a horrible feeling of being captured in entirely disjointed world. Only once, when I had all four wisdom teeth removed, did I feel otherwise. I could still fell the pain, although it was as if it was like a balloon tethered to me by a long string. ‘Hey’, I thought, ‘that is pain. It is mine.’
Regards reality, thanks. Here I am now considering the observation of Nero Wolfe that to the criminal everything he has done is logical within his own logic. That Nero has in common Hercule Poirot. Maybe I am needing a mystery fix.
I can think of one and only one author who could, to everyone’s great delight, use Deus ex machina and make it work. Wouldn’t he make just a delightful Terry Prattchett character? Prattchett has the happy talent of being able to breaking rules ever so properly. As I have not yet read them all, please be gentle if you have to tell me he has.
Finally, whatever the length, please keep blogging.
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Since this is a thread on dreams and the comments are from (mostly, I would assume) writers, I wanted to know if something like the following has ever happened to you.
When I was younger, my mother had bought just about every Peanuts collection there was. I read them constantly. When dreaming, I would see the comic strips, but I was aware that I was filling the balloons with my own dialog a split second before I read it. As I got older and started reading novels, this changed to paragraphs. I was aware of a blank page ahead of where I was reading, just as I was aware of blank Peanuts dialog balloons, but I was also aware that I was filling those empty spaces with words just ahead o where my eyes were reading.
Anyone?
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well, I’ve read in dreams things I hadn’t written yet. (“what is Draw One In The Dark.)
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Not me, but both of my sons were murder to teach to read, because instead of reading what was on the page, they kept inserting their own words that started in similar fashion to the words they were trying to read.
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My body appears to be able to learn and filter out painkillers. The first time I get a new one it’s a lovely floaty feeling and the pain goes away. Successive happy pills just numb pain, no floaty, and then even the pain numbing diminishes. When I go to the dentist, even, I burn off Novocaine. If it’s a long procedure they give me nitrous AND Novocaine, so I stay numb long enough. I have tried to explain to my brainstem that this is Not Helping but it never returns my calls.
My dreams don’t helpfully write stories for me, alas, but sometimes they are so vivid I should really write them down with the header THIS WAS A DREAM so I don’t think they actually happened. The one where I bury a body, especially.
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Sure… Keep telling yourself that was a dream… Heheheh…
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Why would I go to all the effort of digging a grave in the gravel pit I call my back yard when I have a perfectly good 60′ deep old well? Theoretically, of course.
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Well? Only if you could stage it to look like the corpse became a corpse by accidentally falling into the said well.
Decomposing bodies stink to high heaven, something often ignored in TV programs. This is one good reason to bury them — with a healthy amount of lime sprinkled over them. With modern technology I wouldn’t dispose of a body on my own property if I could help it.
In fact, I probably wouldn’t risk killing anyone, the possible penalty is simply not worth it. The time in jail, a possible the death sentence, and all that time involved in the court system too.
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That is why this world desperately needs a portable hole, a portal to a pocket dimension where inconvenient *cough* objects can be placed for a more opportune time. Ideally the T velocity in those dimensions would be variable, allowing some items to experience subjective time far shorter than in our dimension, keeping the bod … ahem … item fresh (just speaking speculatively, you understand, it might be useful to stash a corpse for a year and extract it fresh as the day it went in.) Alternatively, if time passes far more quickly inside the pocket it would offer the potential to age some whiskey or dessicate a corpse for easier disposal.
The only question (after the one of manufacture of these holes) is whether it would be better to sell them as a mass market product or to tailor them to the bespoke trade.
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You know, there’s a series of stories in which a core of adventurers — say three friends — can be hired — in the manner of the Saint — to use these holes for various things from body disposal to fixing unhappy marriages. Um…
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LOL. Oh, thank heavens. I do this to anesthetics. They had a heck of a time putting me under for caeserean. I also do this with alcohol. I’ll be dead drunk, get very cold, then I’m perfectly sober. There is NO explanation.
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I’ve found that dreams tend to come in three flavors – random and forgettable, usefully strange (usually the last one before the alarm blats), and foretelling. The third kind are the rarest but I can tell instantly when I’ve had one. My plot problem solving tends to happen on the treadmill or while I’m cruising the local walking trail before dawn. Dreams may give me the problem, but walking gives me the chance to let solutions bubble up.
Alcohol is off the menu and the only vision I’ve had came from a reaction to an anti-inflammatory following wisdom tooth removal. The elephants really were pink.
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I have the prophetic ones too, but they’re usually REALLY short snippets, and hard to use — though I have a couple of times. Including future books and houses I ended up buying.
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Mine come in these flavors:
[A] Grey and mysterious with vague feelings about what they were about. (Possibly just “forgettable”, but since I also have type [B], [C], & [D] these are extremely frustrating to me.) I could also probably put “sensation” dreams in here too, where I feel an incredible emotion or something like pain or cold with no context to it.
[B] “Casual” dreams. Short scene or confusing series of scenes that aren’t quite connected. So either I have forgotten the in-between bits or there were none.
[C] Epic dreams. I mean, I have written them down to become novels or novel series before. They are full of the sorts of detail you might get in a movie. Sometimes complete with soundtrack. I should probably also include the dreams where I’ve woken up with or because of physical results. (ie: Undressing in the dream -> undressed in real life) I used to sleep walk frequently as a child.
[D] Prophetic. Runs in the family. From both sides, really. My mother was the one who dreamed about the explosion at a factory we drove past every day, but my dad was the one who inexplicably took a different turn to take an alternate route literally moments before it exploded. And that’s only one incident. >_> My dreams have mostly been about relationships and babies of people I was close to.
/off-topic
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Mine come in these flavors:
[A] “Grey” and mysterious with vague feelings about what they were about. (Possibly just “forgettable”, but since I also have type [B], [C], & [D] these are extremely frustrating to me.) I could also probably put “sensation” dreams in here too, where I feel an incredible emotion or something like pain or cold with no context to it.
[B] “Casual” dreams. Short scene or confusing series of scenes that aren’t quite connected. So either I have forgotten the in-between bits or there were none. This is more or less a rare category for me. I’m much more likely to dream [C].
[C] Epic dreams. I mean, I have written them down to become novels or novel series before. They are full of the sorts of detail you might get in a movie. Sometimes complete with soundtrack. I should probably also include the dreams where I’ve woken up with or because of physical results. (ie: Undressing in the dream -> undressed in real life) I used to sleep walk frequently as a child.
[D] Prophetic. Runs in the family. From both sides, really. My mother was the one who dreamed about the explosion at a factory we drove past every day, but my dad was the one who inexplicably took a different turn to take an alternate route literally moments before it exploded. And that’s only one incident. >_> My dreams have mostly been about relationships and babies of people I was close to.
/off-topic
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I’ve just been diagnosed with a pinched nerve. This is a tremendous relief, as I was having all sorts of paranoid ideas about just what was causing those pains in my leg.
The doctor gave me something called “gabapentin”, which is normally used for epileptics and others with shorted-out nerves. When I went to get the prescription filled, the pharmacist cautioned me about it: “You know the George Carlin routine? Think of this stuff as the third tequila.” He was right. I took it just before bed, and was off to the best night’s sleep I’ve had in over a month.
He also prescribed a hydrocodone/acetaminophen combo. Eh, whatever. It doesn’t have enough hydrocodone in it to even make me lethargic, much less sleep and dream of pink elephants, and all the synthetic NSAIDS might as well be so much chalk so far as my metabolism is concerned. On the other hand, I can take one-gram doses of aspirin daily and still clot and heal from minor cuts so quickly I take them for granted.
But I feel better today than I have in weeks. I’ve even managed to get some errands done, and if this keeps up I might even be able to do laundry :-) No dreams, though. More’s the pity.
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*reads halfway*
I have had at least one dream, and I think more than one, where I was so intrigued by the plot that I started writing it down. In the dream. Which led to at least one OH CRAP reaction when I realized that the fast-fading — even as I wrote, in the dream! — coherency was not going to be captured on paper after all, because the paper wasn’t real.
I want a neural interface to record my dreams. They’d probably be loads better than a lot of drugs. Especially when I’m on decongestants.
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(Apologies for my doublepost above. D: )
I write down my dreams in my dream all the time. >_>; Or tell them to someone. “This dream was EPIC, I have to make certain I remember it…”
What usually ends up happening is I remember the original dream and the version I wrote down/told to someone in the dream – which is always slightly different as I try to make connections within the dream as if I were analyzing it and story-fying it with my conscious mind.
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I wish that writing them down actually helped me remember them! It helps a little, but the sudden realization that I don’t have the thing I wrote usually undoes most of the benefit. :(
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I always forget the good stuff that comes to me in mental twilight. I also always forget to A) have a notebook at bedside, and 2) remember that it’s there when and if it is.
I would venture to guess that, had I remembered all that, I’d have won a Hugo every year for the last forty. As it is, well.. Check it out.
::sigh::
M
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I understand completely. I have an Etch-A-Sketch® brain, and as soon as I stand up, like now, I…
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I have VERY odd dreams, usually extremely short, and completely bizarre. For instance, I found a penny in a toilet bowl (fortunately clean) once, and, while in the dream, was very fascinated by this. End of dream.
On the use of drugs, I take fairly large doses of painkillers to get any relief, and no real mental effects from them, but if any drug or alcohol puts me to sleep, someone else wakes up in about 30 minutes and does odd things, usually without my remembering. I don’t take sleep medicine nor go to sleep drunk anymore.
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Not dreams, but: There’s many stories out there (of variable veracity) of a person who is in an otherwise-normal situation, and for no reason heard the voice of someone he’d not heard in years (usually as a result of the voice’s owner being deep in the cold, cold ground) telling him “do this *RIGHT NOW*”; the person did it, and managed to avoid becoming a corpse himself. The spiritualists, of course, see this as “proof of ghosts”.
I came up with another explanation: The person’s brain subconsciously picks up a “something is wrong” signal, and creates a “here’s how to rectify it” message. However, sending it as the person’s own mental “voice” proves insufficient to get the person’s attention; thus, the subconscious says to itself “OK — he won’t listen to himself, but he *will* listen to So-and-So”; and sends the message in So-and-So’s voice. The person, having been thoroughly conditioned to “listen to, and obey, So-and-So’s orders”, hears the instructions in So-and-So’s voice, and immediately “snaps to attention” and executes. Bear in mind: All of this is happening at speed-of-thought; the only part which registers fully is “So-and-So’s voice said ‘do this’; I must obey”.
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Pardon my many rambles on this topic. >_>; I was just nodding and agreeing with pretty much everything in the original post, plus many of the comments and got carried away. D:
But I write in a semi-dream state quite frequently. It’s part of why I have my hours flipped around from normal people. It’s quieter during the night, so it’s easier for me to slip into. Then I sleep the day away and start over again. (With sleep mask and earplugs if necessary.) Wrote just shy of 4k words between the hours of 3am and 9am yesterday, actually. Would have gone longer if my body weren’t exhausted from being a lady.
One of the weirdest writing dream-states I’ve ever been in was self-induced as an experiment. I had only the basic idea for an anthology I was thinking of submitting to and needed to put more of it together before I started writing. So I put on some Asian instrumental music (the anthology was wuxia themed), turned out the lights and hopped on the exercise bike, having set a timer for either 60 or 90 minutes. The story came together very quickly since all I really had to focus on was my thoughts and the music (at that point I was more regular about hopping on the bike, so I wasn’t thinking much about my body).
I’d try that again sometime, but only if I remembered to have a light within reach or a candle or something. When time was up I bruised myself a lot navigating around in the dark. Not necessarily as good for writing as brainstorming, as I did need a shower after and I don’t think I got many words down before I was tired.
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PS: Because apparently I can’t shut up tonight (apologies).
Another for the semi-straight-edge crowd of creatives.
Rarely drink (I’m an extreme light weight anyway, so it doesn’t take much and the one time I’ve had an actual hangover, it lasted three days – thankfully only with nausea rather than worshiping the porcelain god). If I’d ever had the idea that I might “let go” every once in awhile, it died because of that.
I rarely even take pain meds if I can help it. I think very hard about whether or not I need ibuprofen for my joint pain or lady pains. Thankfully I’m not prone to headaches. I take anti-histamines only if I have to, because I’ll be miserable either way – either with the symptoms or drowsiness and muddle-headedness.
With dream state attainable without intoxicants and a dislike and distrust of intoxicants in general, why bother? I’ve always wondered about why so many writers would turn to such things, considering how much we’re used to controlling or arranging. And some of us are actual control freaks.
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anti-histamines turn off the writing-thing. I’d like to know why, but they do.
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I may have to experiment. With so many things working backwards on me, it just might help if I take antihistamines. :-)
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I was going to say “impossible” but my husband is reverse wired for a lot of drugs. For instance Codeine acts on him like speed. (Four in the morning. He was walking in circles in the bedroom talking math to me. VERY fast.) Caffeine otoh puts him to sleep. So, who knows?
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I think it is because you have a choice — sodden solid stuffed nose without drugs or sodden solid stuffed thinking with drugs.
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I usually have disjointed and nonsence dreams. I only once had a dream that rolled me out of bed and running for the keyboard. It’s been sitting for a few months . . . must dust it off and see if it’s still as good (in a very strange way) as I thought it was.
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