EXEGETICAL COMPONENT
‘Unearthing Worthwhile, Innovative Mental Treasures’: On Dreaming and Writing
INTRODUCTION
Throughout history, the dream has been seen as a wellspring of inspiration for creative practitioners, including writers. In Writers Dreaming (1994) Naomi Epel interviews 26 prominent writers on the relationship between dreaming and creativity. Writers, including Clive Barker and Stephen King, are asked to interrogate their personal writing processes, and account for how they have turned their dreams into works of art. Stephen King, for example, shares a revelatory childhood nightmare, and claims it as the genesis of his bestselling work, Salem’s Lot (1975):
It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on …show more content…
I decided to focus my research on the materialising of story ideas from the ‘dreamlets’ (Schacter, 1976), ‘micro-sleeps/dreams’ (Oswald, 1962), or ‘hallucinations’ (Mavromatis, 1987), of the ‘Hypnagogic State’ (Maury, 1848) — the period of threshold consciousness we experience at night as we transition from wakefulness to full-sleep. Despite there being a very similar period experienced in the morning as we transition from full-sleep to wakefulness, referred to as the ‘Hypnopompic State (Myers, 1904) — characteristically identical in nature — this paper is solely concerned with the dreamlets of the hypnagogic state. To follow, I offer my own practical methodology for attempting this, a methodology which invokes and extends upon the work of Paul Carter (‘Material Thinking’, 2004) and Nancy de Freitas (‘Active Documentation’, 2002). Carter states that:
Material Thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching questions. What matters? What is the material of thought? To ask these questions is to embark on an intellectual adventure peculiar to the making process. (Carter, 2004, p. …show more content…
In an article entitled ‘Dream Incubation: A reconstruction of ritual in contemporary form’, Henry Reed (1976) charts this rich history from ancient origins in shamanistic practice to its possible advantages in a contemporary context — by providing insight into his own burgeoning research practice. Indeed many other researchers, particularly within the arts and sciences, have explored the use of dream incubation techniques for contemporary problem-solving and self-reflection (e.g. Faraday, 1972, 1975; Garfield, 1974; Dement, 1974; Barrett, 1993, 2010; Delaney, 1996; and Dement & Vaughan, 1999). Despite the suggestion of a general consensus that ‘if it is possible for an experimenter to influence the course of a subject’s dreams, then it should be possible for dreamers themselves to influence their dream content’ (Runco & Pritzker, 1999, p.602), researchers still take to designing and formalising their own techniques. For example: Delaney (1996) suggests using written stimuli. She instructs experimenters
‘Unearthing Worthwhile, Innovative Mental Treasures’: On Dreaming and Writing
INTRODUCTION
Throughout history, the dream has been seen as a wellspring of inspiration for creative practitioners, including writers. In Writers Dreaming (1994) Naomi Epel interviews 26 prominent writers on the relationship between dreaming and creativity. Writers, including Clive Barker and Stephen King, are asked to interrogate their personal writing processes, and account for how they have turned their dreams into works of art. Stephen King, for example, shares a revelatory childhood nightmare, and claims it as the genesis of his bestselling work, Salem’s Lot (1975):
It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on …show more content…
I decided to focus my research on the materialising of story ideas from the ‘dreamlets’ (Schacter, 1976), ‘micro-sleeps/dreams’ (Oswald, 1962), or ‘hallucinations’ (Mavromatis, 1987), of the ‘Hypnagogic State’ (Maury, 1848) — the period of threshold consciousness we experience at night as we transition from wakefulness to full-sleep. Despite there being a very similar period experienced in the morning as we transition from full-sleep to wakefulness, referred to as the ‘Hypnopompic State (Myers, 1904) — characteristically identical in nature — this paper is solely concerned with the dreamlets of the hypnagogic state. To follow, I offer my own practical methodology for attempting this, a methodology which invokes and extends upon the work of Paul Carter (‘Material Thinking’, 2004) and Nancy de Freitas (‘Active Documentation’, 2002). Carter states that:
Material Thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching questions. What matters? What is the material of thought? To ask these questions is to embark on an intellectual adventure peculiar to the making process. (Carter, 2004, p. …show more content…
In an article entitled ‘Dream Incubation: A reconstruction of ritual in contemporary form’, Henry Reed (1976) charts this rich history from ancient origins in shamanistic practice to its possible advantages in a contemporary context — by providing insight into his own burgeoning research practice. Indeed many other researchers, particularly within the arts and sciences, have explored the use of dream incubation techniques for contemporary problem-solving and self-reflection (e.g. Faraday, 1972, 1975; Garfield, 1974; Dement, 1974; Barrett, 1993, 2010; Delaney, 1996; and Dement & Vaughan, 1999). Despite the suggestion of a general consensus that ‘if it is possible for an experimenter to influence the course of a subject’s dreams, then it should be possible for dreamers themselves to influence their dream content’ (Runco & Pritzker, 1999, p.602), researchers still take to designing and formalising their own techniques. For example: Delaney (1996) suggests using written stimuli. She instructs experimenters