Courting Medusa: The 3 stages of a creative life

While it is true that many creative people in history have suffered many forms of malady from birth, both physical and emotional, the creative life itself can become quite literally maddening.

This article will study three distinct stages during a creative lifetime and the effect this can have upon the mental wellbeing of the creative individual.

01 Seeking inspiration
In the initial stage, during the early development of creativity, the creative individual wants to grow to their full creative potential as quickly as possible, so as to maximise their output as a fully-matured creative mind.

The creative individual will seek to analyse themselves and their artistic processes in order to develop themselves further. They will study a range of factors (such as their historical influences, the times of day at which they achieve their creative peak, the input of their peers and contemporaries and the effect of other stimuli in the media and the current cultural scene etc.) in order to find the right mix and work processes that increase both the quantity and quality of their creative output.

There is also a key desire to understand both the positive and negative contributory elements in order to enable the creative person to be able to switch their creativity on and off like a tap. Particularly in a commercial environment, the pressure to deliver quality, within rapid timeframes set by others, creates the need to remove as much mystique from their source of creativity in order to enable the creative individual to dominate and take full control of it.

02 Conflict begins
The point at which the initial stage moves into the next phase is marked by a single revelation that brings the first period to a dramatic halt.

The fear that arises is that if the creative should ever wholly grasp the full parameters of what feeds their creativity then the creativity will vanish and dry up in an instant. Like a mysterious gas within a balloon, it will escape as soon as the balloon is opened up to for examination.

It is the mysterious and abstract nature of creativity that is, in itself, part of the engine that drives the creative power behind the individual. But the creative individual’s inspiration is still a critical factor and cannot be ignored. It must still be nurtured and cultivated, but maintained at a distance.

The need now arises for the creative to never lose sight of their inspiration and yet never regard it with direct clarity. It is something that must be maintained within peripheral vision.

The creative individual is likely to attempt a few experimental projects, outside of their regular modus operandi, in order to reintroduce some vague mystery to their creative production and ‘re-blur’ the edges of the fragile creative bubble.

03 Claustrophobia sets in
Where as the transition from the primary stage into the secondary one was marked by a single defining moment, the passage from the middle phase into the third and final stage is less distinct – it is a gradual slide and could well be argued that the third phase is largely the second phase repeated, but more severe.

Despite the attempts of the creative individual to keep their inspirational essence vague, and at a slight distance, the passage of time will inevitably increase their knowledge of what makes them tick.

The repetition of familiar tasks and patterns on top of their inevitable increased knowledge within their field of expertise will make them far more perceptive and intuitive in recognising the processes and environmental conditions that favour their creative output. Much of what has been almost subconscious will now become tangible through familiar patterns forming.

Also the desire to produce originality in the face of all they have created to date means they need to risk getting ever more closer to the creative barrel to scrape what might be left in the bottom. Like Perseus seeking to slay the Medusa, they must get ever closer without looking the creature full in the face.

The need to get closer to something ever more familiar that needs to be kept slightly unfamiliar rapidly erodes the safe ground and leaves a slender pillar to stand on.

To the outside viewer, the huge extent of creative output from a creative lifetime seems a huge world that the creative individual occupies. But to the creative individual within the bubble, the ever shrinking no man’s land between them and their creative inspiration becomes suffocating.

Dare to daydream

My brother was talking to me on the phone a while ago about the fact he had been having lucid dreams. A lucid dream is one where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and can often move around at free will and manipulate the environment within the dream.

In one particular scenario, my brother found himself in an empty field and, having always wanted to experience flying, decided to charge about with his arms flapping at his side. Being unable to achieve take off he decided to consult the internet for some advice on flying.

Apparently the theory was that much of your behaviour during lucid dreaming is dictated to by your conscious brain. As a lucid dream involves your conscious awareness invading your subconscious mind, it also brings with it the restrictions of waking life, hence my brother’s inability to take off.

The way to get around this was supposedly to think to yourself during the day when you are awake that you can actually fly. You have to convince yourself that you can fly when awake so that this then implants into your head and is added to your toolbox of available actions during your next lucid dream.

I never did follow up on whether he got to fly or not but I did say at the time that I wasn’t sure if all this was a great idea. Certainly if someone was prone to sleep walking, convincing yourself that you can fly when asleep would not be a wise move.

But there is a deeper reason why I think that tampering with your dreams is not a good move and it is this – dreams play a very significant role in our psychological wellbeing.

When you copy a large file onto a computer, although you might have enough free space to hold the new data, your computer might not have a single block of space to put it in. This is because that when you delete old files, your computer does not close up the gap that the removed data leaves behind and so you end up with free space on your hard disc being in sporadic patches. In order to fit a larger file onto the disc, your computer will often split the file into smaller fragments and then place the file in several locations across the disc.

As this process repeats, more and more files become fragmented and so your computer will begin to slow down and lose performance. When reloading a fragmented file, the hard disc has to read from several locations at once and rebuild the file on the fly.

One solution to this problem is a process called ‘defragging’ which is where a small application is run that sorts through the hard drive and tidies up the allocation on the hard disc so that all files are allocated in single blocks.

This not only speeds up the processing time of opening these files, it can also open up more free space on the disc.

I believe that dreaming is the brain’s equivalent of doing a ‘defrag.’ The subconscious brain, freed from the restraints of our awake consciousness, whizzes through all the outstanding concerns and unfinished thoughts we never got round to resolving and completes them (or at least progresses them on further).

By invading our subconscious brain with our conscious self we interrupt a critical system process that our brain needs in order to maintain itself at optimum performance.

People often say it is a good idea to ‘sleep on a problem’ and the issue does seem to be less of a concern after a good night’s sleep. Is this just because we feel better for a night’s resting or is it more that our subconscious has been processing the issue away from our conscious brain?

So why do we experience all the surreal images and weird happenings when we dream? There is abundant research to show that our brain works best when dealing with images rather than ‘plain text.’

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then by processing issues as images our brains can race through larger abstract concepts at a quicker pace. Freed from our own logical understanding, the visual representation in our brain can look strange and jumbled.

The thought that then occurred to me was whether the power of this subconscious cognitive processing could be harnessed during our waking life? When we have an instantaneous gut-reaction that turns out to be a good decision, was this a lucky guess or the power of the subconscious at work?

The surrealists in their manifestos sought to bypass the conscious self and enable the subconscious spill out unhindered, but can the subconscious be harnessed as an engine to accelerate the conscious mind?

And how do you tap into the subconscious processing power of dreaming while awake without your consciousness overriding it? Hypnosis may be one suggestion but sending your brain into a trance-like state that is more disconnected than sleeping would be counterproductive.

Is it possible to fully ‘day dream’ or are the two states of mind too distinct and solely designed for their respective realms?