The metaskill of dreaming brings with it a built-in reward: the glorious split second when the world suddenly reels, a thousand gears snap into place, and the long-hidden answer appears, shimmering, before your disbelieving eyes.
While not every epiphany packs this kind of punch, many do. It all depends on how difficult the problem was, how important the outcome is, and how long the solution has eluded you. And it also depends on the beauty—the sheer aesthetic elegance—of the final answer. Imagine the breathtaking moment when Einstein realized that the secret of relativity could be expressed in three letters and a number. He once likened the surprise of scientific discovery to a hen laying a golden egg. “Kieks! auf einmal ist es da!” Cheep! suddenly it’s there!
I can honestly say that I’d rather have an epiphany than win the lottery. Okay, the lottery brings money, but it leaves you with the problem of how to turn your money into the kind of transcendent experience that makes life worth living. It’s much easier to turn epiphanies into money than the other way around. Winning the lottery is like finding a golden egg; learning to dream is like raising a golden goose.
There’s a good reason why people have reported sitting bolt upright in bed, suddenly awakened from slumber after weeks or months of wrestling with a problem. Their subconscious mind has been busy working behind the scenes to sort through the rational complexities that kept the solution hidden. This “dark time” is known as the incubation period, a stage when the problem, as it was originally framed, does not seem to yield to a solution. The solution can only come when the rational mind lets go so the dreaming mind can take over. It can happen during actual dreaming, but it can also show up anytime the rational mind lets down its guard—while taking a shower, driving a car, lying on the beach, or having sex (presumably with one’s muse). Once, when Johann Sebastian Bach was asked where he found his melodies, he answered that the problem wasn’t finding them—it was not tripping over them when he got up in the morning.
The bolt upright moment is the point at which a new idea clicks into the right criteria, even when the criteria are poorly understood. Sometimes what you think are the right criteria are not, and you find that your subconscious brain has reframed the problem. Other times, the criteria are so complex that your rational brain can’t make sense of them, leaving the job to your dreaming mind.
Imagine criteria as a pile of pick-up sticks that happened to fall in a certain pattern. Each stick is a line item on your problem-solver’s wish list. All you have to do is find a pattern where most of the pick-up sticks overlap. But there’s a catch: Some of the sticks are hard to see, some are more important than others, and some won’t stop moving. The shifting, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t landscape of criteria can overwhelm the focusing mechanism of your mind.
Have you ever pointed an autofocus camera into a moving crowd? The camera will have so much trouble deciding on the focal point that you’ll miss your shot entirely. You’ll hear the lens zooming in and out, but the shutter won’t click. An autofocus camera is a little like your rational mind. It doesn’t like ambiguity, so it will either take the first picture that comes into focus, or else become confused and freeze. This is the problem that the new multifocus cameras solve. They capture all the information in the scene, but the leave the final decision on where to focus until later. In human terms, it’s like allowing time for incubation.
When a fresh solution to a problem finally does come into focus, the emotional brain sends a signal to the rest of your body—sometimes described as a tingle, a flash, or a jolt—that tells you something remarkable has happened. Developing a sensitivity to these signals is an integral part of being creative.
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