Chris (17:58)
So I find that, at least for me, I have no evidence that this is true, in that there are. I think people talk about these two states, our active learning brain, which is the one that you and I are using that right now, when we need to recall on things, we need to connect dots and we need to formulate words into sentences. And then there's our archival brain, the brain that's recorded everything that we've ever learned in our entire lives. Every experience, thought, emotion, taste, feeling. It's recorded everything. Ideally, we would be working with our archival brain to be able to call up things, but it's very hard to access outside of our dream state. The reason why we have such strange dreams is because we. During our sleep, and this is why sleep is so important. We're defragging, compartmentalizing, recording the day, and we're also mapping it to everything we've ever experienced before. Hence why we have such strange, nonsensical, non linear dreams. And if you don't sleep enough, you don't give yourself time to process and record all that stuff. What we want to do is to be slippery, to be able to slip in between the two states. Now some people have lucid dreams where they can actually be aware that they're dreaming while they're dreaming. Every once in a blue moon I might be able to do that, but as soon as I become aware, I wake up. So that's a skill in itself. So the best time, and I think the most of us would say that we're the most creative and clear minded, most, I guess our most brilliant self is when we're doing nothing while we're awake. This is really important. This is why people have those brilliant inspirational moments in the shower. The shower we've done thousands of times before. We enter into the autonomic state, which is we can do things without thinking. Driving is like that. Vacuuming can be like that. Washing the dishes or mowing the lawn can be like that. Going for a very gentle, comfortable walk can be like that. Especially if you walk the path many, many times. This is why people say when they're stuck, they want to go for a walk in nature. Because nature doesn't have noise, it doesn't have stimulation. Because what we don't want to be doing is learning. Because when we're learning, we can't access the archival brain. So this weird self hypnotic state, we're able to use our thinking, learning brain powered by our archival brain. And so if you want to be a more creative person, you want to write better, if you want to come up with better ideas, put yourself into states where you could access both. They're fleeting, they're hard to access. But if you can make a habit of this, you can actually do this. And I've done this many, many times in my life. And famous inventors, thinkers of our times have done this literal thing before they even understood what this thing was all about. And I've heard many reports on this. I think it was Jefferson or Edison, who would literally work at their desk until exhaustion while holding a steel ball in their hand. And they would do that because as they were slipping into unconscious thought that when the ball would, or their hands would relax, it would drop on the floor and it would make a loud sound and they would wake up and they would jot down ideas. Now you can't do this in a prolonged state because you're not getting restful sleep. You're not getting that necessary recuperative sleep. But you can do it for periods of time, especially when you need to. So use this with caution, everybody. How I do this is before I go to sleep, I have a very specific ritual. I immerse myself in deep research and reading. And research doesn't mean I have to read biographies and books and look at statistics. It could be anything. But I just want to make sure my mind is properly saturated with the problem and any inspiration that I can draw upon. So my creative process back in the day when I was writing commercials or writing treatments for commercials and pitches, is that I would ask my interns to research everything they can about certain keywords, and they would do that, and most of it was visual research. So they would literally show me thousands of images. We'd sit down together and do, like, three or four interns in organizing folders and just show me so many different things. Like, that's good, that's good, that's good. Save that. I want more of that. And I'm just going through kind of like how you would brainwash somebody. You've seen those programs when they chain you to a chair and they're just showing you images after images. Well, these are images that were designed for a purpose. And then I would go to sleep, and before I'd go to sleep, I would have a conversation with myself. And other people do this as well, so it's not something new. I'd say, okay, well, Chris is going to go to sleep. I need your help. Need you to work on this, and I need you to come up with a solution. By the time we get up and without failure, it's sometimes not the first night, but by the second or third night, the ideas are formed. And then I. I always have a notebook and a pen next to my bedside, because those ones, I don't want a chance that I'll forget it. And so what happens is, in the morning when I'm showering, sometimes it will just come to me. I'm like, this is it. This is brilliant. And I go over to my wife, who knows I'm working on a big project. I'll say, I figured it out. She's like, figured it out. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Here's what I'm thinking for this campaign. And she goes, that is brilliant. When did you come up with that? Oh, in my sleep, in the shower. And she's like, I hate you. Okay. And the reason why this doesn't work for a lot of people Number one is because you've got properly saturated your brain and literally, figuratively understand what that means. Like, think of your brain as a sponge, and that you have to soak it with so much stimulation that it cannot hold anymore. At a certain point, it is a diminishing return on investment of time and energy. You just. I can't take any more images. Can't. Read another article. My brain is mush. Step number two is to have the conversation with yourself and be ready for what's about to happen. You don't force it. You just have a conversation, and you activate your subconscious, your archival mind to do the work for you. It's still you. And there's a famous director. His name is Michel Gondry. Do you know Michel Gondry, famous music video director who transitioned to making films? Some of my favorite Eternal Sunshine and Spotless Mind, Be Kind, Rewind, these bizarre concept indie films. And he described having this dream for a music video. And when he woke up, he was so upset because it was somebody else's idea, he couldn't steal it. This. He realized he was stealing from himself. And this turned out to be a music video for the Foo Fighters. When David Gro and some of the bandmates were dressed in a dress and his hands grew into outsized hands, and he was fighting with these super large hands. It was in his dream. So a lot of people in history have been able to do this. So I'm telling you, it's not a rare thing. It's just intentionally setting this up so that the surface area of luck increases.