Why do all the best ideas come when we're going to sleep?
"I'm on annual leave this week and I am going to write every day!" I tell myself. I set up a programme for the week and I start to get excited.
Things are going to happen, I think. BIG THINGS. The most brilliant, inspiring, once-in-a-lifetime things that nobody else has ever thought about!
Then I sit down. And everything goes blank.
Staring at an empty screen is tiring in itself. I yawn and decide I need more energy. Naps always help. I lie down, and just as I drift into sleep, all my best ideas appear:
PLOTS!
CHARACTERS!
PERFECT SENTENCES!
HEADLINES!
CHAPTER NAMES!
HIGHLY QUOTABLE WISDOM!
I am half asleep. I am at my most tired. I don't have the energy to catch them like bubbles before they pop. Why does THIS have to be the right moment for these ideas to start talking to one another, like they are bantering over prosecco at a party in my head?
Wouldn't it be great if we invented a new dazzling mobile app that would resolve this predicament?
Let's call it 'NapChat'.
You switch it on and, as if by magic, it captures all the narration going on in your mind you didn't even knew you had! Kind of like a modernised fax, from one mind machine to another. I mean, we never thought the day would come where our phones would listen to us and decide our best news feeds (and other terrifying things) without us typing them in. So why not this?
“Sometimes a dream almost whispers… it never shouts. Very hard to hear. So you have to, every day of your lives, be ready to hear what whispers in your ear.” ~ Steven Spielberg
I wonder who else would be interested in my app... Many famous creatives are well-known for giving most credit to their dreams. The legendary screen makings of Steven Spielberg (especially E.T.) prove the extension of the fantasy worlds in his mind, even going as far for him to call his studio Dreamworks.
While visiting Lord Byron in 1816, Mary Shelley had a horrific nightmare about a "hideous phantasm of a man, stretched out, and then, on working of some powerful machine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion". Thus, the beginning of Frankenstein appeared on to her writing page the next morning.
Salvador Dali described his paintings as ‘hand-painted dream photographs’, and perhaps his most famous piece ‘Persistence of Memory’ full of melted clocks echoes his surrealist title.
"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." ~ Henry David Thoreau
Much research has been done around the increase and effects of creative thinking for those who sleep well and have vivid dreams. According to a National Geographical study, the brain is like an email account and, while you're napping, it clears out your trash file. We learn more, boost creativity and improve memory when we allow our brain to snooze.
But wouldn't it just be a bit more handy if our brain had a scribble function that could also be wifi-ed to a laptop? It will happen, people. You heard it here first.