How about drawing inspiration from your dreams? The surrealists were rather fond of this, particularly Salvador Dali. He once wrote about a technique he calls "slumber with a key" which involves napping in a chair with a metal key, which one holds tenuously above a plate on the floor so that the noise it makes wakes you the second you've fallen asleep. Supposedly this gave him complete clarity of mind with which to brainstorm ideas. I wrote a bit about this subject for class, once:
Quote:
In the book, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, which he co-wrote with Haakon Chavalier, Dalí has this to say of sleep, "you must know that it is precisely during this sleep which you wrongly regard as reducing you to a state of paradoxical inactivity and indifference before the imminence of the work which you are preparing to execute, that you will secretly, in the very depths of your spirit, solve most of it's subtle and complicate technical problems, which in your of state of waking consciousness you would never be humanly capable of solving." He goes on to describe a technique he calls "slumber with a key", in which he advises how to reach a state of creative enlightenment through dozing for the shortest amount of time possible. "Even a second is infinitely too long", he writes. He achieves this by holding a metal key above a plate before going to sleep, so that the noise of the falling metal will snap one back awake, hopefully on the cusp of a dream, the aim being to write down the details of said dream to use for inspiration later on. He speaks of a "figurative moment where you had barely lost consciousness, and during which you cannot be assured of having really slept, as not a second more is needed for your whole physical and psychic being to be revivified by just the necessary amount of repose."
Another, easier method would be to simply jot down the details of your dream the moment you wake up after sleeping as usual, which should work well if you tend to remember them anyway, though I am rather fond of Dali's quirky little method!
19 Jan 2013, 8:31 pm
