“Sleep is the greatest creative aphrodisiac. Indeed, we already know that dreaming regulates our negative emotions and daydreaming enhances our creativity, while a misaligned sleep cycle is enormously mentally crippling. According to Stephen King, the celebrated novelist explores the similarity between writing and dreaming. He considers the role of a daily routine — something many famous creators use to center themselves — in inducing a state of self-mesmerism that produces the paradoxical alchemy of disciplining our minds into unleashing their unrestrained creative potential, something King calls creative sleep. King likens the creative process to a kind of wakeful dream state. Just like sleep shapes our every waking moment, King argues this dozing of the waking mind shapes our creative capacity by releasing our repressed imagination. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight — so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 01:10:22 +0000
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