蜜芽传媒

The artist Salvador Dali had a way with spoons. If you鈥檝e ever wondered how he came up with the surreal images he created, then an examination of his sleeping techniques may provide an answer.

He would sit in a chair, holding a spoon between his finger and thumb, with a plate underneath on the floor. He would then doze, and inevitably the spoon would fall from his fingers, crashing onto the plate and waking him up. This enabled him to remember the dreams and images from the dozing state he had been in, which scientists now know to call the hypnogogic state.

It鈥檚 between wakefulness and deep sleep, and is a period of high creativity, that we often miss, simply because we don鈥檛 remember what happened in that time. The scientist Thomas Edison was similarly committed to this hypnogogic state as a way of thinking creatively. He would hold not a spoon but a steel ball in his hands to the same effect.

This week, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a new device has been developed which does the same thing as the spoon and the ball but with high tech innovation, in a hand -worn device called Dormio.
As the lead scientist Adam Haar Horowitz commented, it鈥檚 using technology to access the poetic, metaphorical side of our cognition. Unsurprisingly it鈥檚 been nicknamed the dream catcher.

We spend so much of our time just concentrating on what鈥檚 in front of us: dealing with the everyday - family stuff, sorting out childcare, keeping a hospital appointment, working out our money, travelling to and from work. When is it that we get this kind of in-between time, to go deeper into the endlessly creative dreaming that every one of us is capable of?

We can cast ourselves too easily as only useful when we are achieving things. But sometimes, a surprising way through an insoluble situation or an intractable problem can be found by spending even a short time in our creative hinterland.

A flourishing spiritual life knows the essential value of this kind of time. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Jacob was dozing at twilight when he imagined a ladder leading to eternity. Joseph dreamed about the demise of his family, and what鈥檚 more had the courage to tell them - and the New Testament Joseph saved Mary and Jesus from danger by intuiting in a dream that Herod was a threat to all of them.

One of the essential assumptions of the spiritual life is that we are a mystery even to ourselves; and that the journey inwards is as creative and vital as any physical journey. And daring to explore this hinterland makes us spiritual adventurers of the bravest kind.

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