Is the half-asleep mind more creative?

I’m beginning to think so, as I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, not really of my own volition … rolling around a bit, and finally getting myself to the page, under a yellow light, to just see what comes up.

Three nights ago, I wrote a timeline of my life. Two nights ago, I played with triangles and pondered geometry and genius.

And last night, in an entry titled “MIDNIGHT PAGES, 1.18.2020 @ 3:00 am,” I wrote an interesting draft of a poem that somehow blends suburban life with my wilder nature. Here’s a good chunk of it:

Forced Air

I can almost hear the distant traffic
as the hum of ocean waves crashing,
the thunk and clack of the furnace
like the mating call of some animal
hiding in the thick forest foliage,
the refrigerator rumble as the buzz
of insect wings, flying.

hoping, somehow to link this suburb
to the sublime sentience of all things —
tune my senses to the presence
of a life beyond my own, beyond these
dry walls and weather-sealed windows.

Still, silent spiders crawl in the cracks
and string nets in the corners, around cupboards
bringing the outside in,
casting their magic just as they did
with my grandmothers and grandfathers,
the genetic descendants of the stars
we sketched and sterilized so they
would fit into the stitches of our flags.

And still, my blinds are drawn, keeping
the night sky out, with the street lamps
and headlights that might shine in
on my own thrumming darkness,
my living room mind, refrigerated
left-overs and a half-loaded dishwasher,
and a thermostat set to sixty-five degrees
to help tell my body it’s time to sleep.

It seems that these states near-dream consciousness, where I don’t really know what’s going on, when I barely get to the page, can be the most fruitful. Have you found this to be true as well?

That, in just showing up without an idea of what you’re actually doing that actually yields some thing ?

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