The Power of Napping

The shower was always my holy place for writing. That was where the engine of creation purred loudest. It seemed like whenever steamy water was running, new ideas would float down and all I had to do was reach out to grab them.

Great, right? But, listen, you can’t stand in the shower all the time; you can’t use that as a mechanism every time you have a character problem to solve. I needed to have a shower without being in the shower. Otherwise, all I would have is shards of time where creativity—real creativity, not just brutish solutioning—could flourish.

What was it about the shower that made ideation easier? The susurration of the showerhead? The calming massage of the jets? The warmth?

In the end, I recognized that the mental state induced by the calming of the shower invited a dreamy lucidity to my thinking. I could at once languidly and with great rapidity move between ideas without stumbling on the necessity to somehow verbalize internally what I was thinking. There was no internal narrator. I was along for the ride with the machine in my head from whence ideas spring.

All right. Where else does that happen? Dreaming leaps to mind. Except dreaming is unconstrained by judgement, steered by nothing coherent (at least in my case) and impossible to deploy purposefully. Unless. Unless you do steer it, point it at things. There is that liminal between utter consciousness and the abstractions of REM sleep where you can control the dream machine of your mind.

At first, I tried attaching reins to the machine when as I woke in the mornings. This proved difficult as my mind was still grappling with hundred-eyed cats or whatever I’d been dreaming about just previously. But then, I realized I could nap. I could nap with intention. I could have something I wanted to work on, and hold it in my mind (visually, if at all possible) and float my brain into the ocean of sleep and, no surprise, it worked. I could ideate without gatekeeping myself. Ideas would flow. I could bob along for quite a while (especially if I had a cup of coffee just before a nap) and make things happen without getting in their way.

Amazing.

I know that this isn’t ground-breaking; this revelation is my own but has been known for quite some time. But nobody told me about it. I had to discover it for myself. I’m telling you about it now, just in case you’ve never exercised your brain this way.

Give it a try sometime. It works. Its fun. It’s water-wise.