Posted on 01/03/2022 8:24:13 AM PST by Scarlett156
The painter described falling into the briefest of slumbers to refresh his mind. Now scientists have shown the method effective at inducing creativity.
[Full Transcript]
Christopher Intagliata: Salvador Dali had a peculiar way of refreshing his mind—something he called "slumber with a key." In his 1948 book "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship," he described how it worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Includes the audio and full transcript. Really fascinating and this is - let me add - something I've been experimenting with lately. It works!
Reboot.
Edison did the same thing with a ball. He’d sit in his chair with his arm suspended at his side, hand holding a ball . When the ball dropped, he would awaken, refreshed. Don’t do this while driving!
I was just having a convo this very morning with Mr K (not the one on this forum) about the “area between sleep and waking.” I have studied lucid and prescient dreaming for a long time, but I always wondered about all those funny little ideas and images you start to get in your mind when you are just about to fall asleep. They’re so hard to describe sometimes, and yet you can derive a lot of insight, information, or whatever it is, from them!
I do this with a beer in my hand all the time. My dogs love it, my wife not so much.
Power naps just work. Going into a power nap with a problem that needs to be solved almost always presents a solution that wakes you up.
Napping is one of the great habits of successful people. Or sometimes it just means you need to stop drinking wine before noon.
Lol... But... Wine before noon can sometimes be inspirational too. :)
The chemist Kekule saw a snake grabbing its tail in his mouth and thereby discovered the benzene ring ,one of the seminal discoveries in organic chemistry.
I thought separate beds with Emily who had the Jimmy-legs was the key to good sleep?
Edison did the same thing with a ball. He’d sit in his chair with his arm suspended at his side, hand holding a ball . When the ball dropped, he would awaken, refreshed. Don’t do this while driving!
= = =
I had this engineering class, Tue and Thu afternoon 1 pm, after lunch. Quiet, large room with filtered, warm sunlight.
My grade did not reflect Edison’s talent.
Drawing tables with stools. Older, kind of quiet, and kind of boring prof.
All the ingredients for sleep.
So, I would place my elbows on the table, and lightly hold my pencil between two fingers. The plan was that dropping the pencil would wake me.
Worked kind of OK. One time however, I was out. Pencil dropped. I waked, quick. Reacted and tilted stool back and forth, hard. I did not crash, but was awake for the rest of that lecture.
He referred to his creative method as “Critical Paranoia” and used it to make objects in some of his paintings come together as a face. He wrote a novel during his war years in exile in New York, an apology for his previous pro-fascist stance during the Spanish Civil War called “Hidden Faces”. One of his creative tricks was to sit in a chair with a sheet of paper between his thumb and forefinger for a period until he began to doze off. As slumber caused his hand to relax and the paper to slip to the floor, he would awaken and use the images in his mind during this “twilight” in his paintings. He could paint two images of the same scene from slightly different positions so that when viewed in a stereopticon, rendered the image in 3-D. The boy was a serious genius.
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*writes this down in “Kristi’s Book of Excuses”*
Ya. He’s not my favorite person - I’m sure I would have hated him had I ever met him. But fun to read about!
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