“Creative work requires a connection to one’s inner monologue, and it is from this stream of desires, emotions, and ways of making sense of the world that new ideas and novel perspectives arise.”
—Wired to Create
Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire
Writing is not easy. Sometimes, more than writers care to admit, the critic stands over you, or more likely, inside you, whispering, “You’re never going to make the grade,” or “You will never be famous so forget it,” or “Your writing belongs in the trash.” You desperately want it to go away, this critic that appears every time you begin to write your novel, and you brace yourself for the whispering lies. You hope the critic will leave on its own, but this will not happen until you banish the menacing inhibitor—forever. And when you do, the critic dissolves like salt in water as you enter the realm of the daydream, that is, dreaming in the light.
Dreaming in the light whisks away the critic’s noise, and you hear your inner voice, the crucible of creative thought, and you suspend any disbelief as your dreaming takes you on a fascinating journey. Sometimes, dreaming in the light might be as simple as watching the cumulus clouds floating outside your window or listening to the chirping birds in the park, or dreaming in the light might lead to mysterious creatures rising in your mind’s eye and images you have never seen before, and you let these images play in your imagination as you wander in this playground of new ideas. Maybe you crawl through a break in the fabric as you’re led to someplace you know not where, but the imagination beckons you because it knows you are the maestro of your very own irreplaceable creativity.
You may not remember all the images the imagination has shown you, but this is okay, because once you know that dreaming in the light shows you riches you did not know you had, you will call up new images because they are at the heart of your creativity, what you have longed for so you can get going with the matter at hand: The opening sentence in the novel that has been weighing you down, or the voice of a character you have never heard before, or the plot that has eluded you, or the stanza in the poem you started so many years ago. You want to inhabit this imagination, no, need to inhabit your imagination, and you are so grateful that you have shut the critic out. Now, you trust the voice that is your creativity inside your imagination.
Once you have kicked out the critic, banished the negative thoughts, and accepted the truth of creativity and the imagination, your daydreaming repertoire reaches further than you had ever thought possible. You open doors to a new freedom where a deep place of deep thinking and creativity await you, where ideas tumble out like so many characters you have been searching for, and you write with confidence and grace because you have vanquished the old order of leftover noise.
Try it for a day, this dreaming in the light as your creativity and imagination flow through you.