The Groove Issue 73 - How To Use Daydreaming For Creative Success
Welcome to the 73rd issue of The Groove.
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HOW TO USE DAYDREAMING FOR CREATIVE SUCCESS
Artists are deliberate daydreamers. Their work is to bring their imagination and fantasy outside of them and materialize it in a piece of art.
For artists, the act of daydreaming is neither just a wandering mind nor being absentminded or distracted. Instead, daydreaming is a crucial habit they cultivate to stimulate their ideas.
Similarly, many entrepreneurs use daydreaming to feed their fantasies until they build empires that reach millions of people and generate billions of dollars. They set out to create work rich in imagination and fantasy.
Today, I’m giving you a tight excerpt of my upcoming book “How Creativity Rules The World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas Into Gold” (HarperCollins).
I have condensed an entire chapter into a handful of paragraphs below.
At the end of every chapter, there is an Alchemy Lab section so you can take actionable steps from what you’ve learned in that chapter and adapt them to your life.
I have also cut in a third the Alchemy Lab in that chapter (I want you to read the whole book!) so you have an opportunity to think through these prompts until the book arrives.
Exploring The Realm of The Unconscious
A sketch of Sigmund Freud created by Dali in 1938 when the two met in London.
The realm of the unconscious and dreams were some of Sigmund Freud’s chief preoccupations. Daydreaming also became a subject of his interest. While some of his theories have been challenged and his methods and conclusions disputed, he garnered enormous attention, and respect, for elaborating arguments that were completely novel.
In 1908, when he wrote a short essay titled “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” the concept of creativity wasn’t as widely accepted as it is today, so he circumscribed his analysis to novels written by successful authors with mass appeal.
Freud concluded that these writers had a common denominator. They indulged in daydreaming in order to create a world of fantasy, evoking their childhood at a time when all they did was play. From childhood play to fantasies, dreams, and novels, Freud found a thread: People attempt to change the unsatisfactory world of reality by inventing one in which wishes are fulfilled. That is exactly the domain of the artist. They can alter every bit of reality through their minds and with their hands.
Never Shy Away from Outlandish Ideas
Dali in his studio captured by Marc Lacroix in the 1980s.
In 1924, Andre Breton wrote his Surrealist Manifesto aimed to free a group of artists’ imaginations from conscious control by encouraging automatic, uncensored, free imagery that merged fantasy with reality.
Around the same time, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, a twenty-one-year-old Spanish art student living in Madrid also became seriously interested in Freud’s work.
He never shied away from going where his most absurd thoughts led. He knew they were fertile territory for innovation. Dalí questioned why most people dismissed their own outlandish ideas and daydreams and labeled them “impossible” or “irrational.”
Not only was Dali a brilliant painter but he was also an inventor.
The people he pitched his inventions to considered them pretty absurd, but years later other inventors would make similar things viable. Dalí wrote in his 1942 autobiography that he had invented “artificial fingernails made of little reducing mirrors in which one could see oneself.” This happened twelve years before Fred Slack, an American dentist, invented and patented the first commercial acrylic artificial nail in 1954. That invention led to a market that, aided by fashion and female hip-hop performers, is projected to reach $1.2 billion in 2024.
A drawing from the 1930s that Dali sketched to illustrate what the tactile cinema would look like.
Dalí, who was obsessed with filmmaking, also wrote about another of his inventions. The “tactile cinema” would “enable the spectators, by an extremely simple mechanism, to touch everything in synchronism with what they saw: silk, fabrics, fur, oysters, flesh, sand, dogs, etc.” Everyone thought he was crazy. It took four more decades for the first commercial 4D film, The Sensorium, to be screened in a Six Flags theme park in Baltimore in 1984.
Monetizing the Absurd
Dali’s “tactile cinema” was also the precursor of virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as interactive and immersive surrealist theatre experiences, like the smash hit Sleep No More by British theatre company Punchdrunk. This experiential play, inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir, has been performed daily in New York City since 2011 (with a break for the pandemic).
It started as just an immersive and interactive experience, where the audience follows actors and explores, freely, multiple darkened floors, labyrinthine realistic interiors, and fantastical spaces. After two hours, the audience finishes the experience in a 1920s-style cabaret setting that offers drinks for sale.
The experience takes place in a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot building in Chelsea, which Punchdrunk and an investor company baptized “The McKittrick Hotel.”
Through a combination of smart and creative business moves, these two companies capitalized on the success of the play, and the building now houses a couple of bars, a rooftop restaurant, more cabarets and speakeasies. They also host a variety of lavish theme parties every month. The estimate is that altogether the experiences that happen inside McKittrick bring close to $60 million in sales annually.
Alchemy Lab
• Approach a current product or service you or someone else offers with an alternative mindset. Add elements that make it surprising, confusing, absurd, or unpredictable. Do not censor yourself; keep exploring. If somebody would have told us twenty years ago that our phones would play music, contain an entire library of books, and allow us to open up a live screen with an interlocutor on the other side of the world just by pressing a button we would have laughed at the whole thing.
• Draw music. Listen to your favorite song and what comes to mind when listening to it. On just one blank page, doodle, create a variety of shapes, use different colors or just a pencil.
• Engage in automatic writing as soon as you wake up. Keep a pen and notebook by the side of your bed and grab them as soon as you open your eyes. Write down your dreams or whatever crosses your mind without stopping. Try to do it as rapidly as possible without consciously editing your thoughts.
Thank you again for the incredible response to my book!
Preorder it from Amazon, B&N or your favorite independent bookstore and claim FREE immediate access to my creativity online course broken down in practical modules, videos and PDFs to go at your own pace.
You also gain access to the monthly group Zoom calls which are priceless!
This program is guaranteed to spark a creative breakthrough in you, no matter what you do. Now for a limited time, you can get it during the preorder phase of my book at no cost.
Read the many breakthroughs that past participants have experienced here.
All you have to do is send your purchase confirmation to book@mariabrito.com and you will be in.
All details are here.
If you have preordered the book and are enjoying the course, tell friends about this amazing deal!
Publishers Weekly reviewed my book calling it “a punchy look at the mindsets and skills necessary for innovation” and recommending it to “those looking to spark some creativity”. Read the review here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
Why artificial intelligence will never replace creativity.
What is the ‘box’ when it comes to thinking 'outside the box'?.
9 tips that cultivate team (and individual) creativity.
Can an Umbrella Unleash Your Creative Genius? Yes It Can.
5 ways to boost your creativity.
Why Creativity And Data-Driven Are Not Mutually Exclusive In Today’s Creator Economy