themselves in a trance state via meditation or actively listening to music. Others go into a trance watching TV. I get great ideas when I’m at the movies. (Curiously, it doesn’t work while watching a movie on videotape — I think the level of concentration is too low — which may be a key to the way these processes work. For the car people, it only works while driving — not as a passenger. The logic behind this is similar.)
What is this spontaneous generation of unconscious ideas? I must confess that, really, I have no idea. But I do know how to make it happen. Spontaneously. The key is to loosen the grip of consciousness on the mind, and get the logical, linear, Q&A thinking process out of the way.
Spontaneous generation comes in two basic flavors –fortuitous and deliberate, both of them “unconscious”. An example of the fortuitous kind is what happens when you are driving your car, and an incredibly useful thought just “comes” to you. If you are not prepared, you are likely to lose it as quickly as it came. On the other hand, if you keep a voice recorder or notepad handy, you can capture this potential gem. Plus, being prepared to capture these “fortuitous” intuitive pearls, seems to be a very important part of having them more often.
An example of the deliberate version is when, upon retiring for the evening, you tell yourself (with feeling and conviction) you want to dream the solution to a particular problem. If you get lucky (back to fortuitous), you will. If you do this repeatedly — program yourself with a problem — you will start to dream solutions regularly.
Analytical types may scoff at this “telling yourself” bit. But recent research in cognitive science indicates a possible model