Drift out of your mind, into yourself.

Sigmund Freud

Dreams · 1900

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud read dreams as disguised messages from the unconscious, built from images, condensations and displacements rather than logic.

Carl Jung

Active imagination · 1913–1916

Jung let inner images unfold while awake, then gave them form through painting, writing or carving. He described the method in The Transcendent Function (written 1916) and practised it in the Red Book.

André Breton

Automatism · Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

Breton defined Surrealism as writing or making faster than the critical mind can interfere, and with friends invented games like the exquisite corpse.

Salvador Dalí

Paranoiac-critical method · 1930s

Dalí trained himself to see double images, one form hiding inside another, and called the method a spontaneous way of irrational knowledge (The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935). He also napped holding a key, waking as it fell, to catch the images at sleep's edge.

Hypnagogia

The threshold of sleep · named 1848

Alfred Maury named the vivid images that appear while falling asleep. In 2021 a study in Science Advances found people who briefly entered this earliest sleep stage were more likely to find a hidden solution afterwards. Theta rhythms (about 4–8 Hz) are typical of this drowsy state.

D. W. Winnicott

Potential space · Playing and Reality, 1971

Winnicott, a paediatrician and analyst, argued that creativity happens in play, and that play needs a holding environment first: someone reliable enough nearby that you can stop guarding yourself. He called the area where it happens potential space, neither wholly inner nor wholly outer.

Monotropism

Attention in deep channels · 2005

Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson described autistic attention as monotropic: pooled into a few deep channels rather than spread thin, so interruption costs far more than it does for others. The account came from autistic researchers writing about themselves.