It bugs me that the latest Time magazine (August 17/24) from which I plagiarized the above title is only interested in issues of physiology. Especially, when the far more interesting, useful and cutting-edge issues are about something else: the unconscious mind. By 1964 I was depending on that so-called black box (the unconscious) every Thursday, Friday or Saturday night.
As a young church minister in the reformed tradition, I had to write two new, creative sermons nearly every weekend. My church included many university faculty and engineers from the local technology firms, who brought high expectations with them to worship.
Thankfully, I learned just a couple years after seminary graduation (1962) that if I went to sleep on Thursday or Friday with a sermon or a creative idea half-finished, or needed some new ideas or anecdotes, I’d have everything I needed when I woke up the next morning. Or if I was just playing around with some creative ideas during the day, there was a high chance that the idea would be complete--or at least zinging some new pointers my way--when I woke up the next morning. At first, if it was an unfinished sermon, I’d go to bed very tired and worried—and toss and turn much of the night. But once I figured out that my unconscious was going to be working all night, I just went to bed—and slept easily. It was years later that I realized that I was actually priming my night brain during the day. I rested easy, because that thinking process rarely failed. So, I made a practice of leaving pad and pencil out on the kitchen table to jot down my new ideas first thing, and not lose the thinking that had been gained over the night. Forty-five years later I still use the model for my thinking and writing, and it works even better. Sometimes my night brain is so busy that I need to take a nap during the day.
When I shared my insight on how my brain worked in those early years, some understood and agreed instantly, while others...
And then, two years ago, I found John Bargh.
John Bargh and the new unconscious
I had been working through a lot of social-psych research studies on attachment avoidants, the impact of abusive families on their children and their need for psychodynamic and trauma counseling for potential success. Inevitably the unconscious came up, requiring more knowledge in that field. My search led me to Bargh, the world leader in knowledge of the unconscious. I found extensive support for my idiosyncratic night time, black-box studies. And far, far more than I could ever imagined.
Ironically, though Bargh has been publishing research since 1978, his real breakthrough on “content” came as a result of a dream in 2006, about an alligator in the Everglades. An alligator who had flipped over and was showing his white belly. And that single dream told him that his assumptions about the unconscious needed to be flipped over, that the unconscious came first, “both in the course of human development and in the course of our individual development from infancy to childhood to adulthood.” What Bargh realized is that the human brain evolved slowly, first as a basic mind of millions of organisms without the reasoning and control we have today, that acted adaptively in order to survive. Our conscious mind, in contrast, emerged late in evolution as an add-on. It gave us new ways to meet our needs and deliberately use that old factory-installed machinery from our evolutionary past.
My conscious awareness was feeding all kinds of experiences and ideas to my unconscious, which because of evolution has a “hidden past, a hidden present, and a hidden future” that is influencing me before I knew it. Both my unconscious and my conscious exist in all three time zones at the same time.
Bargh explains it this way: “The mind operates much like the stereo equipment I used as a DJ. . . except the overlays are much trickier and the sound mixers have more active inputs. It’s as if three songs are always playing. The main song plays the loudest. . . while the other two (past and future) are fading in and out and slyly changing the overall sound. The slippery nuance is this: in the hidden depths of your mind, there are important lyrics, melodies and backbeats that you aren’t always aware of. Even when they are the most strongly altering the character of the song you’re listening to you rarely know to listen for them.”
Finishing off my content with sleep
And what sleep does, other scientists have found, is consolidate our memories, select material to solve our problems, and especially sift through the materials, isolate and store the important take-aways. It may store the gist—the overarching point—of the material. Or it may store important details. Harvard’s Robert Stickgold writes that “When we dream, we get the pieces. When we wake, we can know the whole.”
And in his description of my creative dream power, he validates my belief that in sleep I was always adding new ideas, fine-tuning and finishing off my sermons.
Scientists have also confirmed my notion from the 1960s that when I stop turning and twisting in my sleep—as a result of sermonic stress—and just lay back, go to sleep and count on my dreamwork, it’ll be done for me.
John Bargh, Before You Know It.
Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep.