TL:DR – If you’re working on a creative project, take note of your dreams, they might carry nuggets of inspiration.
The title of this post might have you imagining some kind of AI interface that lets you tap into your subconscious and create output based on prompts you give yourself…will…in a way it is. But the interface isn’t what you think…
When I was writing my book Deceived Wisdom, there were lots of ideas constantly swarming around my brain for weeks and months on end. Sometimes, I’d fall asleep and be dreaming I was still writing at my desk, I’d wake up at 5am and be writing for an hour or two some days before I got on with my regular, non-book commitments.
Some nights though I’d not only be dreaming about writing, but I would think of new ideas for chapters in the book and better still I’d find myself actually writing the introductions to those chapters in the dream. It was weird, they weren’t lucid dreams where I knew I was dreaming within the dream, they were just me in a dream writing and then remembering what I’d written when I woke up.
Often what I remembered was a bit scrambled and needed a lot more work, but sometimes it was almost fully formed and only needed light editing. Maybe I shouldn’t reveal this, my publisher might want to claw back some of the royalties seeing as it was my subconscious that did some of the work. But, when you think about it, where is the “you” that does your creative work anyway? All of it is coming from your subconscious really, your “you” just sees the output from your neural networks.
It also seems to work with music, for me. At the beginning of the first COVID-19 lockdown when performing live with my band C5 was on enforced hiatus, I had a dream that we were all sitting on empty suitcases in an airport, there was a melody that came to me while I was chatting to Jo the other lead singer and I was telling her the chord progression. When I woke up, I grabbed a guitar and noodled about a bit on the chord progression. The lyrics to the song actually morphed into a memory of the dream and the chords changed, but the creative spark came from somewhere deep while I was sleeping. The song became Complications, which you can listen to here.
I wonder whether there really is a reliable way to trigger this dream writing. I know that people often report having more lucid dreams at night if they actually talk about lucid dreams before bedtime, it seems to stimulate the brain. So, maybe just discussing this internal ChatGPT before going to sleep might open a valve and let creativity bubble to the surface while you’re asleep.