Block buster
The internet site Quora is, as far as I can tell, the Pret A Manger to Yahoo Answers’s Burger King. I’m a little astonished by how they’ve managed to gather so many respected people to answer other people’s questions.
Someone linked to a question about ways to overcome writer’s block. It has some OK answers, and then this from Heinel Wong:
When I am out of stuff to write, I usually just go to sleep. I find that the creative side of the mind is more active when you’re about to fall asleep or just waking up (naturally, without alarm clock). Those are the times you want to be careful, once an idea sparks, write it down frantically.
Some time ago I had a dream where I fed cotton wool to a badger. Last night, I became miniaturised, and ran about inside a telephone to stop police (of a similar size) from installing a tracking device, and of all people Jason Biebface (is that his name?) was there too. These are all surely typical examples, and they may have seemed brilliant in the last fleeting moments of sleep, but none of them are of value or interest in the cold light of day.
Maybe Heinel Wong and people are better than me, and have intelligent dreams about proper things. That must be it.
Update: August Kekulé is a guy who had another valueless dream, in which a snake ate its own tail, but it turns out that this helped him to predict the structure of benzene. There.
Ian
19 September 2011
I get the tongue-in-cheek tone of your post, but I believe Heinel is speaking of those thoughts that occur immediately before drifting off and just as you awaken, not the dreams in between. Also, I think you need to have a question on your mind when you are drifting off to sleep to maintain some control, albeit minor, over the lucid state of your mind.
Of course, a telephone version of Fantastic Voyage would probably be quite fun, so perhaps not practical, but…