I have this sense that I’m not good enough at what I do. It’s fairly pervasive. I’ve been trying to figure out where that thought is coming from, and what to do about it.
It boils down a lot to my ideas.
Where do they come from?
I’ll tell you where they come from. I steal shit. As P.N. Elrod says, “File off the serial numbers and call it your own.” Or Neil Gaiman, when asked how he feels about fan fiction, said that seeing as he won an award for a story he wrote about Sherlock Holmes, he’s rather in favor of it.
Like any other creative, I see something cool, think about how I would do it differently, and then do that. Or see multiple somethings cool and think about how to mash them together into something new and cool.
But this winds up making me feel like I don’t have my own ideas. That my creativity is stifled somehow.
Or like if I have a good idea, I don’t know how to take it to that elusive “next level” that authors I admire seem to have easy access to.
So here’s a weird and interesting thing I did to try and get through that block.
I learned how to do hypnosis decades ago. I wanted to have a past-life regression, but I live in a small town in Minnesota, so it’s not like people who offer that kind of service can be found on any corner in the business district. (We don’t have a business district.) Instead, I read a book on how to do past life regressions on other people, and then taught a friend how to do it once I was good at it and had her do a regression on me. It was cool.
BUT what I learned as a side note was how to do hypnotic work on myself for various psychological purposes. It’s come in handy a few times. I thought perhaps using my hypnotic tools to push past this creative block I mentioned above might help.
After getting myself in a nice light trance state, I asked, “Where is my creativity hiding? Why is it hiding? How can I get it to come out?”
I learned some useful stuff from those questions. First, I learned that my creativity was hiding from the people around me who put it down. Second, I learned that it wasn’t hiding from me. Third, I learned that my creative brain is very visual and tactile, and that a trance state is the best way to access it.
The visual/tactile thing makes sense, given that what we know about brains indicates that the language and reasoning centers are pretty well connected, and the image-processing centers are more connected to the emotional centers.
In my trance state, I saw a vision of a door, a small access door to an attic. It was hanging open just a little. So I opened it, and found my creativity in there, waiting for me. A little shy, but excited to see me. I asked what it had to show me, and got a wild ride of crazy images and sensations.
Standing at the beach and feeling my feet sink into the soft, wet sand and knowing that the water held the souls of everyone ever, including me. Watching a super nova explode and catching the incredible energy wave and riding it across space like a cosmic surfer. A forest full of spirits guiding an office worker through to the moment where she could do magic. There were dozens of little vignettes like that, snippets of ideas and images, none of them whole in themselves but all of them interesting.
I hung out there for about a half hour, then asked if I could leave the door to the attic hatch open. I got enthusiastic permission to do so.
I don’t even know how to entirely process what I pulled out of that session. It was weird, and wordless, and fun, and not exactly an instruction manual into my own mind but kind of sort of like that. I know I’m excited, and that I can feel my creative mind willing to work with me and not stay shut off.
I know it’s going to lead to some cool stuff.