6 Things You Need to Know About Your Unconscious Mind

a.k.a. Your repository of brilliance

As a writer, I’m pretty obsessed with understanding my unconscious mind. It is the source of my writing, my fiction, even my inspiration.

What exactly is happening when you’re accessing this space? For writers, this means being in the zone, or being in a state of flow.

Brainwave scans of peak flow states show that you’re “bypassing” the prefrontal cortex.

You’re basically tuning out the part of the brain that is concerned with “executive” functions like analyzing, criticizing, and suppressing your urges.

When you do that, you’re tapping straight into your unconscious mind—what I prefer to call your Inner Self.

Let’s look for a minute at what this Inner Self can do—even when you’re not in flow.

Your Inner Self talks easily.

Forget any ideas you may have about this space being difficult to access. That notion should have died with Freud.

One of the easiest discoveries you can make about your unconscious space is that it can talk.

And it’s pretty easy to hear. Just shut your eyes and ask a question—you’ll get a response.

For example, I think: “I want a raisin.”

And then I think: “Ok, they’re on the shelf behind the blender, and they’re ten years old.”

Surely, I knew that information, but I haven’t thought of it for years. The information was unconscious, but I drew it up with ease.

Freud introduced the whole idea of the unconscious as a space of repression, and we became obsessed with it.

If you’re studying the space yourself, you’ll start to notice that a lot of your unconscious thoughts are right there, helpfully not clogging up your conscious mind, but fully accessible.

Your Inner Self loves association.

If you give it a raisin, it will cough up a memory of those nasty golden raisins that you picked out of your Christmas Panettone…and it will give you these associations on a sliding scale of “most memorable” all the way down to “utterly boring.”

In this sense, it also really enjoys making associations. It’s like that one friend you have whose trigger words involve puns. You accidentally say the word “mushroom” and suddenly they’re off. How fungi it is that you mentioned their favorite food!

Your Inner Self will go the distance, too, because there’s so mushroom for improvement.

This space also communicates as one would expect from a room full of excess information: in symbols and ideas and images and stories.

Your Inner Self is filled with more information than you can imagine.

For most writers, this needs no explanation. As I said, we start writing, and stuff just pours out like a magical storytelling machine.

You ask us: Where did the idea for that character come from?

We have no clue. Even if we have an answer, it’s something we have to think about, because it wasn’t really conscious.

You do this, too. In fact, I’ve written a whole post about the subject and you can check it out here.

The Inner Self knows things that we can’t explain.

For example, it can tell you when to go for a walk to see an osprey. This may or may not mean that it has the power to tap into everything, even things you couldn’t possibly know from your senses alone, but we are accepting for now that it does.

The Inner Self speaks through desire.

This is the really important one—the one you need to practice if you want to access this space: follow your desire!

When I really want to see an animal, I focus on my desire. A while later, my Inner Self will show me where to go with an impulse of desire. It will fill me with a sense of adventure, anticipation, wanting. It doesn’t tell me what will happen, it just delivers a feeling and an image.

Once I started realizing that these impulses were not random, that they were guiding me to what I had asked for, I began to realize that I was in dialogue with my Inner Self.

And we were speaking the language of desire.

The Inner Self will always respond to your desire.

The Inner Self loves association, not just with images, words, and memories, but also with wishes.

When you give it a wish, it will begin its magnificent, offstage work, doing what it does, so that a while later you can have your desire.

It is, in fact, a bit like a magical storytelling machine, because when you put in “osprey,” it spits out a scene of you walking down a barren path, camera in hand, wondering why you’re there, and suddenly spotting a bird soaring overhead, and scrambling to raise your camera and pull off a few shots before it flies away, then going home and discovering that it was frickin OSPREY, which you have never seen in real life before.

What kind of being sits around waiting for you to have wishes, so it can go sort through the mind-boggling complexity of the natural world, just to find that bird you want to see? And all without judging the fact that you want to see a bird in the first place? In fact, it happily carries on fulfilling your next desire and your next.

What sort of being IS THIS, in actual fact?

And this leads me to one final observation.

The Inner Self is filled with love.

Because, let’s face it, the glorious, unflagging practice of wish-fulfillment can only come from a place of true love.