July 28
“If you have been wrestling with a problem all day without making any apparent progress, try dismissing it from your mind, and put off making a decision until you’ve had a chance to sleep on it.” – Maxwell Maltz, M.D. – Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded
We’ve been told that sleep is when the body repairs itself, and that is true. But sleep is also when we gain access to ideas, insights, and knowledge that are circulating somewhere in the “field.”
But don’t think that the only time you can sleep your way out of a problem or gain splendid ideas is when you go to bed at night. You can also gain tremendous traction during the day with cat naps or short meditation sessions.
Benjamin Laskin writes all his novels using a variation of this sleep method. He writes at a coffee shop in the morning, mostly bringing to life what he slept on the night before. In the afternoon he poses a question to his mind about what will happen next in the story, then he sets his alarm for thirty minutes and takes a nap. Every time he does this, the characters in the novel come to life and speak to one another in the form of a dream, which he observes and then records upon awakening.
What Benjamin does is not completely unique to him, even though he did figure this process out on his own. All throughout history, you’ll find that the greatest writers, poets, musicians, artists, scientists, and so on have used a variation of this method.
When’s a good time for you to begin using it?
Matt Furey
Note: The above is an excerpt from my new book, Psycho-Cybernetics 365, to be published on August 19.
