Hugh Garry

Why daydreaming is important to creativity

I've enjoyed some of the articles that appeared over the New Year about the value of silence. Switching off the laptop and stepping away from the iphone is this year's geek equivalent to going to the gym in January. Disconnecting is as hip in 2012 as connecting was in 2011. Everyone is switching off for the weekend as people try to kick the digital habit. There is even a new meal time game called 'Don't be a Dick During Meals with Friends' which requires everyone to put their phone in the middle of the table during a meal. The first one to pick it up to check their email or tweet has to pay for everyone's meal. 

I've recently been resisting the urge to reach for the iPhone as a way of finding time to daydream. Daydreaming is important. Soon after we leave the education system we find ourselves in jobs that require us to unlearn the behaviours drilled into us from our first days in the classroom. Daydreaming is probably one of the most of forbidden rules of the classroom, focus us everything, which is a nightmare for a young mind. As Alison Gopnik points out in 'The Philosophical Baby' it's not that children can't focus they're just not very good at not noticing. 

Creativity is about connecting things and thinking the unthinkable so it should be no surprise that daydreaming forms an important part of anyone’s creative process. Daydreaming takes your mind out of the realities of the moment and into the abstract via a series of mental connections. Scientist Jonathan Schooler from UCSB has done a lot of work in the area of the value of daydreaming and discovered that people who allow their mind to wonder score highly in tests for creativity. 

I love this quote from Virginia Woolf in her novel 'To The Lighthouse' which I stumbled upon via John Lehrer:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes and names, sayings, memories and ideas, life a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space.

The fountain spurting out over the difficult what space is such a wonderful metaphor for the virtues of mind wandering in creativity. Allowing your daydreams to shuffle all those memories you have neatly stored away, remixing moments without your control and then spurting them out as a stream of visions you feel you had not active part in creating. What a perfect way to fill that blank page.

As screens steal our attention more and more the need to schedule daydreaming into our day is something we should all think about if we want to be creative in what we do. Close the laptop, put the phone away, use that spare 15 minutes you suddenly found in your day to let your mind wonder rather than giving it away to a device.

Terry Gilliam on 'where ideas come from'

The answer is 'little elves'. Sorry, but what would you expect from the man who brought Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to our screens. But yes, he's kinda right. The elves do play their part. Recently I posted a video of John Cleese talking about the creative pause. Now his Python buddy Terry Gilliam talks about putting faith in his pixies, or rather his subconscious, to find the connections that create his stories:

I used to say I knew where the ideas came from. Because I'd go to bed, and I'd leave my shoes by the bed. And I'd wake up and there'd be these little elves that would come in and put ideas in my shoes, and I'd just use them. 

I refuse to intellectualize, or try to understand how it happens. It happens, and I just try to ride with it. And the frightening thing is when it doesn't happen, it's actually terrifying because you realize, "I've dried up. It's finally happened: the well is empty." But, then if you get through those periods, then something starts happening again. A lot of what happens, it's like doing a painting without actually doing a sketch in advance. You just start and you got this, you add another thing, boom, boom, boom. 

Just for one example, The Wholly Family, is the scene in the hospital. There was always going to be a hospital scene and the boy would see himself as a baby. But then, I was in this place that repairs dolls, the hospital of dolls, and there was this little plastic egg with a Pulcinella in it, so OK, now we have eggs and that's how babies come. And it just changed it. It was beautiful. I think it's about having an idea and never letting it become rigid. It's just the beginning, and then you just see what you can pull into it. At the end, there you are.

I like that he has this image of elves doing the work for him. Ghosts make another good metaphor for idea generation. Like ghosts the ideas are always there, half formed, floating all around, everywhere you go, waiting to become a reality. Only you can see them because the ghosts are faint realisations of the experiences you've collected. As Gilliam says, 'they are not rigid, they're just the beginning, and then you just see what you can pull into it'. 

Like the elves in the night, the ghosts find you. Probably when you least expect them to visit. Gilliam's came in hospital for dolls. Newton's came when he was in the orchard. Archimedes came whilst he was taking a bath. The ideas come. Eventually. Having faith in ghosts, elves or simply a part of your brain that you don't control requires the kind of leap of faith that only people who believe in elves in the first place are likely to take. Another great reason to cling onto what's left of your childlike mind. 

Seneca, bees and combinatorial creativity

I like this quote from Seneca who uses the bee's process for making honey as a metaphor for creativity. Collecting, combining, fermenting. It's all there:

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, "pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet".... Certain others maintain that the materials which the bees have culled from the most delicate of blooming and flowering plants is transformed into this peculiar substance by a process of preserving and careful storing away, aided by what might be called fermentation, whereby separate elements are united into one substance.

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, in other words, our natural gifts, we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

 

John Cleese on his creative process

Some nuggests of brilliance from John on the power of the unconscious mind and the value of the creative pause.

One of the problems creative people often have is scheduling and process. Randomness and serendipity are such an important part of their lives that there is a reluctance for creating 'moments for creativity to happen'. But as Clesse points out here creating time and space are useful for allowing the brain to wonder, to get into the right mode for thinking. It's what he calls his 'Tortoise Enclosure'. It's an oasis in the middle of your life built with boundaries of space and boundaries of time. Simple as that. 

 

Going diving

A great Tate Short from Maurice Sendak, writer, illustrator and genius behind 'Where The Wild Things Are'. He's like the inappropriate grandpa we all wish we had. So many great quotes in such a short film.

Artists have to take a dive, and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die. Or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come up and do the best work that you ever did. But you have to take the dive, and you do not know what the results will be.

The magic of childhood, the strangeness of childhood, the uniqueness that makes us see things other people do not see.

My work has always been considered inappropriate; but the ones that I love - the ones that I think work as works of art are inappropriate.