Landscape of a writer's mind
While doing my "daily writing" action (15 minutes, stream of consciousness) I reflected on how intense daydreams have begun invading my mindfulness meditations (another daily action). In mindfulness training, daydreams are treated as a distractions, so I must repeatedly return to the clear and simple focus of meditation. Ironically, I'm currently working through a series of meditations to promote creativity. So while I'm aware that these daydreams are themselves a kind of creative impulse, I am practicing letting them go. In other words, in order to really learn how to listen to what's going on inside, I have to keep turning off the radio that magically keeps turning itself on again.
But it's fascinating how much the landscape of my mind has changed from six months ago when I was in crisis. At that time, meditation brought relief. Daydreams seldom appeared, and I had an easier time staying focused. Distractions usually arose as abstract thoughts about things going on in my life at the time. They were softer (though sometimes unpleasant), and easier to recognize as thoughts or feelings. However, the meditations I used at that time were closely guided, with plenty of instructions from a recorded speaker to help keep me focused. I still use recordings, but they increasingly consist of silence in which I'm left to my own discipline (or lack of it) to stay the course.
It would be interesting to explore these daydreams further in the right time. The images are a lot like dreams in that they often sweep my consciousness away completely. I soon come back to the meditation, but I'm discombobulated -- can't remember for a moment what I'm doing or what my focus is supposed to be. In a sense some of the daydreams are lucid and many are not, because I forget where I am or that I am in charge of the situation. There's no sensation that I've been about to fall asleep, just that my mind has become relaxed to an extent that still unfamiliar to me. In fact it's pretty bizarre to find there's such a thin veil between reality and fantasy in waking life.
Writing about this also led me to contemplate the weirdness of writing itself: that some high function in my brain was playing with abstract ideas, and passing them down the hierarchy to the wordsmiths to translate them into interesting English, who then passed them to other parts of my body and ultimately my fingers to type on the keyboard. My fingers themselves each know a small pool of keys, but know nothing of words or letters. In fact no part of my body is conscious of the letters they're tapping.
What this has to do with daydreams, I'm uncertain. But all these thoughts come from a new awareness (thanks to a lifelong fascination with psychology, fueled by the fresh new tool of mindfulness exercise) of what the hell is going on in my body. One of the speakers in one of the meditations from the cognitive therapy course I took refers to the "workbench of the mind," an image I love. It's the space in which mindfulness as therapy allows problems to remain in focus ("How does this affect your body?"), while conventional mindfulness treats all such thoughts as distractions. From that I have developed a metaphor of my own: the landscape of the mind. As an inhabitant of that landscape I am guided by choice (rather than rules or impulses) over where to turn my attention.
It occurs to me I should write more about this philosophy of creativity. I expect many people of artistic persuasion are conscious of their creative processes, as I have been, but recently I've become far more sensitive to actual mental events. It's partly because anti-depressant medication had largely turned off part of my creative impulse. I had drug-induced writer's block for 12 years. But now that quality (which I can describe succinctly as whimsy) is back. So I can perceive what's happening that wasn't happening before. It's entertaining and informative. At times I'm ecstatic about it.