Mind Creative Ideas

We like to think that our successes in life are down to ourselves and our conscious mind with tiny account given to the workings of the unconscious mind. Yet, even at the everyday levels of absorbing the food in our stomach to regulating our breathing whilst asleep, or circulating blood around our body, it is not our conscious mind which manages and controls these activities. These actions are not a query of will-power or conscious thought. Our unconscious mind is an very powerful force which is always at our disposal, whether for these mundane bodily functions or for more creative processes. A surprising number of people have been inspired by their unconscious promptings, leading to inventions, discoveries, artworks and artistic ideas for writing.

In the 19th century chemists around the globe were struggling to understand the nature of various materials including benzene, a natural substance present in coal-tar and widely used in the chemical industry. The structure of the benzene molecule, however, eluded the scientists. A French chemist by the name of Friedrich August Kekulé had been wrestling with the issue for lots of years before discovering the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is a common symbol in lots of ancient cultures). This vision, they said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-to-carbon bonds. This was seven years after they had solved the issue of how carbon atoms could bind with to up to other atoms simultaneously. This experience points to a common theme in inspirational moments: they often come when they are deeply relaxed (or daydreaming as in this case) - exactly when the conscious mind is least involved in conscious and rational thinking.

The Scottish writer Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894), creator of The Unusual Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, had this work published in 1886 and it sold an exceptional (for those days) 40,000 copies within six months. Stevenson one time said that its plot was revealed to him in a dream. As they recounted later, "For days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the alter in the presence of his pursuers."


In our next example, the English author Thomas Hardy was probably focused on thing alone: pruning his apple trees in his beloved cottage garden. They later said that, seemingly from out of nowhere, whilst at the top of his pruning ladders, there popped in to his head a plot for his next novel. What was unusual, however, was that the idea for the plot was accompanied by detailed outlines of the main characters and even examples of dialogue. Deciding to over on along with his pruning, his spouse interrupted him some time later to tell him they had a visitor, by which time everything about this new novel had gone from his mind, seldom to return. His advice to writers: over a pen and laptop with you at all times to prevent the loss of ideas such as they had.