Wake Up to What’s Been Here All Along

The
creative mind is open twenty four hours a day.

Even
when you’re sleeping.

And if you want to become a prolific creator, you have to
practice being proactive with your unconscious mind. You have to view it as
idea processor, waiting at your beck and call, begging you to assign it a
problem so it can immediately go to work for you.

Eric
Maisel, psychologist and creativity coach, pioneered a revolutionary personal
development program called sleep thinking. It’s where your brain continues to work on the issues and
problems that matter to you, but while you sleep. By repeating silent questions
to yourself as you drift off to dreamland, you’re actually communicating with
yourself about your own thoughts and feelings. Even if you’re lying unconscious
in a puddle of your own drool.

Maisel’s
hypothesis is, since the brain’s natural way of working is to perform various
functions while you sleep, productive thinking may as well be one of them. You
simply have to surrender yourself each night to learning about your own life
and what it needs from you. You have to be willing yourself to apply all of
your native intelligence to the task. And you have to be willing to confront
issues you’re afraid to know about yourself.

That
way, you can wake up to what’s been here all along.

I’ve done
Sleep Thinking several times, and had
great success with the program. I found myself feeling more inspired, lucid,
insightful and most importantly, relaxed with the creative process. Nothing
beats waking up with good ideas every morning.

Eric’s
framework does, however, require a heaping amount of patience with yourself. And
it takes about a week on average before anything interesting happens. But
that’s par for the course for any creator. Once you develop that cognitive
muscle, you’ll never want to go back. 

In time, you’ll find that the simple process of asking yourself
meaningful questions as you fall asleep, keeping a dream journal and then
mining those experiences for insight and perspective, is a powerful way to
actively help your material to work on you.

That way, you can wake up to what’s been here all along.