next »

[Evan Balster]

[This was originally composed as a reply to a thread asking for advice on how to start writing for games.  It has been made into its own thread to avoid a massive derail there.]


The following is a very powerful creative technique that requires some patience and an open mind.  It's the best advice I can give on how to be creative on-demand but can be difficult to apply.  It's also rather a personal thing for me to talk about so uh, be aware the shields are down..?

Half-Dreams 101

In the afternoon or early evening, well before you'd normally go to bed, clear your mind.  If you drink tea, a cup of herbal is appropriate here.  Otherwise calm yourself down with whatever sort of ritual you have for that purpose.  Go to your room away from distractions, turn off the lights, lay down in your bed and close your eyes.  I prefer to lay on my right side.

(You may play music, though my luck with this has been mixed; it works best when the music has a consistent and creatively relevant mood, no lyrics, and is conducive to relaxing.  If you use headphones they must not interfere with your comfort.)

Your goal is not to sleep.  (Sleep is failure.)  It is, however, to have a sort of dream.  If you have a story idea you'd like to develop, think about it as you relax.  Otherwise let your mind wander.  Avoid guiding them or formulating expectations about the "dream" you will have beyond a basic premise.  Attend to your comfort and try to shift your focus away from your body; if it begins to feel a little alien that's a good sign.  Avoid trains of thought about your life and worries as much as you can.  As your thoughts take their course, try to visualize them.  Do not force this; your best-case scenario is that your thoughts "run away" and the things you see follow suit.

Let a place take form; one you did not anticipate is best.  Let characters come into existence, if appropriate, and give yourself a persona; these should suit the setting in some sense.  Allow events to transpire autonomously; do not exert too much of your will.  As your character, act, but resist the temptation to fly up into the air or alter the world unless these are capabilities your character has (for narrative reasons) or you wish to move on to a different space.

Good tricks for improving and maintaining your immersion are to generate sensations on your character's body and imagine them -- rub your hands together, blow on them, touch your face, count your fingers.  Take a sharp breath in the world; try not to be distracted by the sensation when your real lungs follow suit.

If you make it this far, and it can be hard, you are experiencing what I call a half-dream.  It will not seem real, and you will not have a convincing impression of "seeing", "feeling" or "hearing" any of the things you visualize at any point, at least if your experience is like mine.  Your memory of the events that transpire, however, will be as crisp as that of a real dream.  The mechanisms of this memory are similar to those applying to dreams as well -- the topics of a conversation will be memorable, for instance, but the ordering and wording will be more difficult.  Visuals and sounds will be most vivid.  Writing things down within a day helps.  Do NOT fall asleep from within the half-dream or you will forget everything.

At this point you can enjoy the benefits of being in an altered mental state which connects you with your intuitive capacities.  For our purposes here, you are accessing your creativity for storywriting purposes.

A wonderful trick for drawing new and unexpected things from your creative mind once in a stable half-dream is to imagine something mysterious -- a door is a prime example -- and approach it without formulating an expectation about what lies beyond or within it.  When you open it, the thing that lies behind will be a surprise which generally relates to the setting.  This can lead to interesting and unexpected narratives.

If you have a more specific narrative idea you wish to explore, setting the scene and letting the characters act works wonderfully.  If you want to think about a place, put yourself there and explore.  It's all very open-ended.

Lastly, this state lets you confront your demons and consult with your heart.  This isn't directly relevant to writing, but personal growth and writing are deeply intertwined.  These are matters psycho-spiritual and I won't ramble about them unless asked to. 


Footnotes:

- Powerful as this trick may be, it may be more difficult than the old-fashioned alternative of mind-altering drugs.  I haven't experimented with those, so I wouldn't know. 

- At one point I spoke to a Buddhist monk who described a similar process and called it visual meditation.  Unfortunately we didn't talk at length and I haven't really researched the topic further.

- Carl Jung apparently gained much of his insight into the human mind from experiments like these conducted on himself and others.  I didn't learn about him until after my initial semi-accidental forays into the technique, and it was a bit startling to see how well his description of the "archetypes" fit my own experiences.

[Capntastic]

You should consider reading Lynda Barry's What It Is, which is specifically about how to channel the creative process.

Her method is something along the lines of conjuring a mental scene, and filling it with details (what are you/the protagonist standing on, how do their limbs feel, what is the air like, is it warm or cold, etc), and finding the best way to recognize and transmit the ideas you want to instill.

One of the examples she uses is, if I remember right, to try to imagine your parents' car when you were little, and what it was like to sit in it, or get into it, or how the seats felt, if it was bumpy or smooth or loud, and all of that.  More often than not, when you try to fill these mental scenes out, they begin to construct themselves with some pretty solid clarity that is easy enough to work with and explain to others via words.

[Morg]

I'm a chronic sufferer of insomnia, and I do something like this all the time. See, I'll try relaxing in bed by thinking about my writing or game ideas, but I still can't sleep for the longest time. The experience you describe is very similar to what happens to me every other night.

[Trystin]

What you basically just described was Lucid Dreaming, in a distant state anyway. If your interested in this sort of thing I suggest looking into it, I haven't done it myself but I tried to quite frequently a few years ago but due to the amount of horror I watch most of my dreams resulting in lucidity would probably end up a bit bad.

But I suggest watching this guy GizEdwards videos on it, particularly

and

, it will explain most of the things you need to know to get started. He's basically a guru to do with the stuff.

I highly suggest this and I am actually thinking of attempting it again thinking back on it now. But depending on your level of lucidity you could probably visualise and create your characters in your subconscious if you desire.

[Evan Balster]

An interest in lucid dreaming and a talk on it which I attended were what led me to discover this method.  I would characterize it as a lesser cousin of proper lucid dreams, which I haven't had much luck with.  Though I could stand to experiment some more.  I'll check out the videos.