Are you like me and have a much easier time composing a piece of writing when you have your fingers on the keys, or pen? I do pretty well with figuring out what I’ll say in an ordinary letter before I sit down to write, but with something more creative, I don’t really even try. Sometimes I’ll think about what should happen next in a story I’m working on, what the multiple levels of meaning say to each other, the significance of the structure of it, but mostly I prefer to go into a kind of trance that reveals the story moment by moment, with each word. What I’m suggesting here works for fiction, and poetry. I’ve written books full of such. It also works for accessing the subconscious, and Higher Self, and the collective unconscious, perhaps the Akashic Records, to use a rather odd term for the recording of facts upon the continuum in a way that can be tapped into.
When we figure out what we’ll write first, we often are thinking in more mental terms, figuring things out linearly, logically, though it’s not always like that of course. Chances are, though, that when we are writing in the moment, as the words flow, we don’t have to worry about remembering the swaths of meaning and plot, to translate later, recording into prose. The words themselves instead create the tone, the images that create new symbols, the line lengths, and sounds of the words which portray meaning in themselves. Writing a story from more of a trance, as we see where it takes us, rather than planning it out and coloring in the numbers later, so to speak, can create more of the trance in the reader as well. I believe writing from that alpha or theta brain-wave state can create that state in the readers, especially if we write stories that free the imagination, and touch on deep universal themes.
I recommend writing this way to my fiction writing students, spontaneously, letting the story transform them from the beginning to the end, so the ending couldn’t have been conceived of by the person who began the story. That person is changed, and the reader is therefore more likely to be changed. The entire story lives more immediately, I believe.
I also recommend writing this way as a form of LucidPlay therapy. Whether you are planning to publish what you write as fiction, or just want to use it to access mysterious parts of yourself, learn and express, you can simply start writing, seeing what comes out. The more you take yourself into a trance, the better, assuming you don’t go into such somnambulism that you don’t write a thing! But in that case, you may find yourself having hypnagogic images that write themselves in front of your closed eyes, and you can watch the movie in your head without needed any writing utensils. Simply observing what you compose in your imagination like that is great too, similar to dreaming, which helps process and create our lives. In that case, I’d suggest jotting down notes to yourself as quickly as possible after, one or two words to capture different ideas and images, so you can then go back later and record it in more detail.
This method can also work while in LucidPlay, writing one word notes in loose diagrams, for example, that means something to you, but maybe nothing to anyone else. When writing these things, you don’t need to think about what someone else thinks so much as what you are bringing through. When writing a story for publication, you want to have the intention of brilliance, but to gain it during the course of the story, go more deeply into lower brain-waves, which are easily accessed by a kind of mental privacy. A non-writer used to tell me to just write, as he watched, that I should be able to share everything I wrote as I wrote it, but that stifled my ability to write. I find that a kind of mental privacy is important. But maybe the word “privacy” is not so much about being alone, as being un-judged. He was watching from a standpoint of fear and accusation, and the fear that engendered within me made accessing the relaxed trance difficult.
However, when in a group of people in a LucidPlay group event, which is accepting, encouraging, not expecting each word we throw out to be perfect, we call out the next lines of a collaborative “poem” of the moment, being creative is easy. There is a kind of privacy there, it could be called, as in feeing at home, not worried about being seen, or caught, or about something that feels foreign. LucidPlay events get into these accepting, loving states, through doing yogic exercises, and spontaneous movement and sound, first alone, creating a sense of privacy in our auric fields, and closed eyes, space in between each other, doing prescribed and predictable movements. Then, opening that sense of privacy outward, as we slowly allow ourselves to see each other in the wider levels of our being, while remaining in our own wide levels of being. This is very unlike experiences people have in day to day life, in which we relate from our lower levels of ourselves.
Using Your Psychic Abilities
As a group, we can write and draw on our own, and then collaboratively as a group in a playful way. We can tap into something larger than ourselves, and use that then to practice seeing into each other using psychic abilities. We can look at each other’s third eyes, for example, seeing into the part of us that writes these stories. Maybe we can see each others stories, send them, to each other in some way not involving words. Maybe not involving images. Maybe not involving understanding at all. And maybe what we see is the inability to do so, which is fine too, as it goes along with choosing to incarnate part of ourselves on this very physically manifest plane of existence.
If you just do it on your own, I’d recommend doing some form of spiritual practice that takes you very deep, or walking in nature while connecting to the plant, animal, and molecular life around you, breathing deeply in the sunshine, doing drumming or shamanic dancing first. However, if you do these kinds of things a lot anyway, and are skilled at moving quickly between one state of mind and another, you may be able to go into the trance quickly. You can even be hypnotized to do so. So, from as deep a state as you can get into, approach your writing space.
You may have something you consciously would like to learn, or process, through writing, and it may be unconscious. As you settle in, you can just set an easy intention, and if you are asking for accurate answers to specific difficult questions, you may want to set your intention magically. That kind of question needs focus, whereas just writing a fanciful story to see where it takes the emotions in your subconscious does better with less focus. The focus is like a lens in a camera, and muscles in your body automatically can create different levels of it by contracting or relaxing.
Just start writing, and only after it’s over at it more critically. You can revise at that point if it’s for publication, and if it’s for your own edification, or for play, you can enjoy it at many levels, some of which you may never integrate into the language-oriented part of your brain. What you write in these things can speak to you, and often to others, at a level that responds to the structures of how the story is presented, the individual associations with images, or characters.