Daydreaming and Creativity

It seems extraordinary that, when training people in creative thinking, I should need to spend such a large amount of time just getting them to listen to themselves.

For it is in our own thoughts and feelings that new thinking, new ideas, are born.

The problem usually stems from our educational pasts. At school it has always been consistently demanded that we pay attention to the teacher. There, “concentrating” means listening to him or her, not to oneself.

Yet so often what happens is that the teacher has said something interesting that stimulates us to go off on a fascinating internal journey, exploring the implications of what has been said. Yet, to the teacher, this can so easily be interpreted and censured as just not paying attention, “daydreaming”.

But how exciting and valuable daydreaming can be.

As the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, put it (in a famous letter to Paul Demeny in 1871): “I witness the flowering of my thought: I gaze at it, I listen to it: I set my bow moving: the symphony stirs into life in the depths, or comes leaping on to the stage.”

[J'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée : je la regarde, je l'écoute : je lance un coup d'archet : la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scène.]

In praise of idleness

Engaging article in Lapham’s Quarterly by Sven Birkerts on the pleasures of idleness - http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-mother-of-possibility.php .

One of the benefits he teases out in his essay is that idleness is the place where new thoughts, new ideas, new connections are born. Over perhaps a quarter of a century I have asked hundreds (maybe thousands) of people when and where they are at their most creative. After a pause to consider, they most often come up with a situation adjacent to being idle – walking, falling asleep, in the shower, driving their car, daydreaming and so on. A couple of weeks ago, someone came up with “riding my motor-bike”.

There is definitely a connection between being distant from a problem one has been grappling with, in a situation where one’s brain is freewheeling, and having a solution pop up, apparently uninvited. Rarely do people mention watching TV, or working at the computer, or using their mobile devices as places where creativity happens. Perhaps there’s just not enough white space available.

Of course, the nexus between daydreaming and creativity is territory explored by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, JM Barrie and many others.

How does being personally creative intersect with the pressurised contemporary life at work? Not easily.