No satisfactory way exists to explain how to form a good idea.
You think about a problem until you're tired, forget it, maybe sleep on it, and then flash!
When you aren't thinking about it, suddenly the answer arrives as a gift from the gods.
Of course, all ideas don't occur like that but so many do,
particularly the most important ones. They burst into the mind, glowing with the heat of creation.
How they do it is a mystery but they must come from somewhere.
Let's assume they come from the "unconscious."
This is reasonable, for psychologists use this term to describe mental processes
which are unknown to the individual. Creative thought depends
on what was unknown becoming known.
All of us have experienced this sudden arrival of a new idea,
but it is easiest to examine it in the great creative personalities,
many of whom experienced it in an intensified form and have written it down
in their life stories and letters. One can draw examples from genius in any field,
from religion, philosophy, and literature to art and music, even in mathematics,
science, and technical invention, although these are often thought to depend only
on logic and experiment. All truly creative activities depend in some
degree on these signals from the unconscious, and the more highly insightful the person,
the sharper and more dramatic the signals become.
Take the example of Richard Wagner composing the opening to "Rhinegold".
Wagner had been occupied with the idea of the "Ring" for several years,
and for many months had been struggling to begin composing.
On September 4, 1853, he reached Spezia sick, went to a hotel,
could not sleep for noise without and fever within, took a long walk the next day,
and in the afternoon flung himself on a couch intending to sleep. T
hen at last the miracle happened for which his unconscious mind had been seeking
for so long. Falling into a sleeplike condition, he suddenly felt as though
he were sinking in a mighty flood of water, and the rush and roar soon
took musical shape within his brain. He recognized that the orchestral opening to the "Rhinegold",
which he must have carried about within him yet had never been able to put it into form,
had at last taken its shape within him. In this example, the conscious mind
at the moment of creation knew nothing of the actual processes by which the
solution was found.
As a contrast, we may consider a famous story: the discovery by Henri Poincare,
the great French mathematician, of a new mathematical method called the Fuchsian functions.
Here we see the conscious mind, in a person of highest ability,
actually watching the unconscious at work. For weeks,
he sat at his table every day and spent an hour or two trying a great number of combinations
but he arrived at no result. One night he drank some black coffee,
contrary to his usual habit, and was unable to sleep. Many ideas kept surging in his head;
he could almost feel them pushing against one another, until two of them combined to
form a stable combination. When morning came, he had established the existence of
one class of Fuchsian functions. He had only to prove the results,
which took only a few hours. Here, we see the conscious mind observing
the new combinations being formed in the unconscious,
while the Wagner story shows the sudden explosion of a new concept into consciousness.
A third type of creative experience is exemplified by the dreams
which came to Descartes at the age of twenty-three and determined his life path.
Descartes had unsuccessfully searched for certainty, first in the world of books,
and then in the world of men. Then in a dream on November 10, 1619,
he made the significant discovery that he could only find certainty in his own thoughts,
cogito ergo sum ("I think; therefore, I exist").
This dream filled him with intense religious enthusiasm.
Wagner's, Poincare's, and Descartes' experiences are
representative of countless others in every field of culture.
The unconscious is certainly the source of instinctive activity.
But in creative thought the unconscious is responsible for the production
of new organized forms from relatively disorganized elements.