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The Logic of Discovery

 

Dream States

At this point, with most of the well-defined problem-solving techniques explored (in a previous post), we delve into the great known unknown, the mind’s secret weapon, the dream.  Therein lies a power most certainly unknown. Let’s begin at the movies.

What happens when you watch an intense movie late at night?  Your mind is absorbed in the pictures, dialogue, and sounds of the film.  Your mind still dwells on these, computing, digesting, and ruminating on all of these even into sleep. In your dreams, your subconscious mind recalls all these thoughts but convolutes them as only dreams can. Maybe you wake up with yourself a part of the distortion. Maybe, you make it through the night of restless sleep but your wake troubled. Dreams fade quickly, happily.  Has this happened to you?  To me, many times. As a pre-teen, my dad took me to the movie, The Man with the Atom Brain.  The imagery and plot of that movie stayed with me for years.

Welcome to one aspect of creative thinking, invention, and conceptual revelation.  How’s that?

Let’s reshape the movie episode. Let’s consider you’ve been working on some issues/problems/situations intensely for days or weeks – right up to bedtime. Haven’t we all? It’s the same story. Your thoughts before bedtime weave their way into your dreams. You wake up the next morning.  This morning you resume your work, but something different happens.  There appears a new idea. It might work, you think! Where it came from is best described as “out of the blue.”

Welcome to the world of discovery! What is described does happen. It’s happened to many, me, and maybe you. This is the power of incubation of thought and the dreaming mind. It is not by formula, and it’s not by logic. It reveals powers of mind unquantifiable and scarcely unqualifiable. It happens rarely, but it happens.  Alas, more often than not, your new idea is no better than any precedent. But how many an ancient hunter woke up one morning with a new approach to their craft? Even the great Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), Lyons weaver extraordinaire, perhaps woke one morning in 1852 with the concept of the punched card programming of looms. It revolutionized weaving – surviving to this day. (They are now electronic.)

Nonetheless, the mind is far more powerful, though decidedly unpredictable, than any assessment has yet shown. The marvel of insight, even through dreams, is essential, fundamental, and without valuation. Logic is but one solution tool, often transcended by the full powers of your mind. Dream-state solutions are so difficult to classify as a method, they cannot be put into our general categories.  They are an essential part of the mind’s toolkit but are rather unreliable. Different from Einstein’s thought experiment, they enjoy no controlled intellectual guidance.  

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