I wildly appreciate you and your service. You are my muse. You help me think ‘outside of the box’, like a cigar smokin’, pink-tutu wearin’, M60 totin’ Arnold Schwarzenegger with wings, that breaks down the wall of “the box” like the Kool-Aid guy.
But do you really have to deliver inspiration at 0230?
I mean, yes, granted, I’ve been letting my subconscious chew on a procedural change for a week now, but c’mon . . . It’s Sunday morning for Og’s sake. Yes, your idea to add a federal reference to paragraph 1.3 is a great one, which came at lunch yesterday. But do I really need the flash of brilliance in adding a chart-based reference to interrupt my Saturday night beach-side dreams of Acapulco?
I mean c’mon now . . . You inspired Ben Franklin the evening of the storm. Edison got your message over a breakfast omelette. Can’t you wait for me to shower first and get some coffee??
Dammit, now I’m up. I’m going to email myself what you suggested for Monday morning.
Tripler
I’m going to put a memo book by my bed from here on out, to document your ‘whispers’ . . .
My wings flapping and glitter blowin’ left me a little pooped.
Needed a break.
I landed on your headboard quite by accident. So heck, I whispered something in your ear. I have no clue what it means. Or how it will work for you.
This pixie blond hairdo doesn’t leave much room in the old noggin fer thinkin’.
If you had a lost tooth I might be a better service.
Any hoozies, gonna nap now.
Count your lucky stars! I’m not sure of the distance as the fairy flies, but they get here pretty reliably at 3 am, fresh out of good ideas and boy are their wings tired… They wake ME up with reminders and premonitions of things undone and the disasters that will thus ensue.
This explains the glitter. I haven’t done ‘arts & crafts’ since 1983.
Yeah, well, you have some level of clairvoyance, 'cause you knew exactly about that bandwidth question I was going to raise with Greg.
Unfortunately, the last tooth I lost was on the ice in North Dakota, from a highstick. You’ve been a far better help since then, albeit you keep really weird hours.
Bulls**t. Your ‘tail’ is the workload and hours spent implementing your ideas, which (hopefully) saves blood, sweat, and tears in the long run.
You too?? I have to wonder of we’re on the same GIF subscription plan.
Tripler
“Hopefully” in the sense that it’s realistically just a coin toss.
Get that memo book. It’s amazing (to me at least) just how badly you (me again) remember the flashes of inspiration that occur just before falling asleep or the ones that arrive unbidden at 0230.
That is how the structure of benzene was solved. You will want a decent voice recorder (e.g., smartphone) and something on which to write; I prefer pen and paper myself.
That’s also how the riff to “Satisfaction” was invented. Conveniently, Keith Richards had a guitar (he’s the kind of guy who never sleeps without his guitar) and a tape recorder near his bed, recorded the riff and went back to sleep. He didn’t remember it the next morning, but noticed he had recorded something lately, played the tape and thought that maybe he could make a song out of it.
Once upon a time more than half a century ago, I woke with an amazing idea for a story or a song lyric or something - the details are a tad hazy after all this time. I happened to have a pen and pad of paper on my night stand, so I wrote down my inspiration.
Next morning, there was a page of indecipherable scribbles, and the genius was lost to the ages. Dammit.
Most of my overnight notes are the same. None were for something as amazing as that Pulitzer prize you didn’t win, but all were equally gibberish in the light of day.
Not so much anymore, but when I was a contractor the fairy was on the same schedule. Sit bolt upright at 2 am realizing something I had missed or a cool answer to a problematic scenario. Never could get back to sleep.
Back when I did research. I frequently came up with “great ideas” in the middle of the night. Needless to say, they almost always turned into rotten fairy dust once I started to put them to paper in the morning.
So I got into the habit of not dwelling on the “bright idea” and assuming it was wrong. Just wait till morning and then see what’s wrong with it. (Sometimes a wrong idea would get me to think of a fix and then eventually lead to something correct.)
Around 11pm last night, I was having an online conversation with a friend of mine, about what I’ll be running at a small role-playing game convention that she’s organizing for a group of us next spring. I suggested that, in addition to the game I usually run (Star Wars), I might also run a newer game, which I’d bought recently (Household).
I then started looking at that new game, familiarizing myself with the rules, and seeing if the books had pre-written adventures I might use. And, then, it was 2am.
Don’t be so sure. An old and painfully direct friend informs me that glitter is the herpes of crafts, and will come back to haunt you for the rest of your stay on this planet.
While I sympathize with your apparent unhappiness with the situation, the Night Owl in me is screaming to inquire, “why is this a problem?” The middle of the night is a nice peaceful time when I get some of my best ideas, and in the pre-retirement past, this was when I got some of my best creative work done. I feel the benefits of sleep at such times are overrated. Sleep is basically a waste of time that is best conducted during daylight hours when the noisy riffraff is out and about. (To paraphrase Dave Barry, in establishing my preferred sleep schedule, my role model is Dracula.)
When I say that sometimes these great late-night inspirations are fueled by vodka or rum, some may question how great these ideas really are, but they usually stand up to scrutiny in the sober light of day. I recall many years ago struggling with a difficult software design challenge, and coming up with the basic idea for a solution while pacing around my living room in the middle of the night with a glass of whatever best fueled my brain at the time of my life (probably vodka or rum). And it evolved into a really solid design.
Also, supposedly, Paul McCartney came up with the tune for ‘Yesterday’ in a dream, and went around humming it to everybody afterward to see if anyone recognized it; because he was convinced his subconscious had stolen the tune from another song.
I woke up with a flash fiction idea almost fully formed. I drowsily rehearsed it, realized I’d lose it, and rushed to my laptop to capture it. Part of the process of that capture went well with the story, so I added it. After some revision over a couple of weeks, I combined it with three other short pieces as a thematic climax. I sent out the combined “story” and it was picked up for publication.
I used to wake in the early hours with flashes of inspiration that I thought would be a huge success. Thinking I would get right to work on them as soon as I got up, I would roll over and go back to sleep. In the morning, the brilliance of the idea was still firmly in my mind, but the idea itself was gone.
This kept happening until I decided to put a pen and pad by the bed and resolved to write down the brilliant idea.
Soon afterward, it happened. I woke in the very small hours with a truly world-changing idea about a new design and concept for traffic light signals. I wrote the idea down and went back to sleep.
At a more decent hour, I got up with great enthusiasm and confidence, to start work on my new design of traffic lights; I reviewed my written notes. The words on the paper were all English words and they were arranged in something approximating English grammar, but what I had written was just an absurd mess of unintelligible nonsense.
When ideas come to me in the midst of night, half the time they’ll be good ideas, the other half will be bad ideas at best. I’ve had a few good ideas in my life, a very small number of really good ideas, I do remember that two of those really good ideas came to me in the wee hours.
