ABSTRACT
Surprise yourself Often when people try to think of ideas their thoughts struggle along in only one direction and it all seems like a long hard slog. If you played with the word grid in
Place names (Module 18) however, you’ve probably realised that there’s a better way to do it – by taking yourself by surprise. When you want to be creative your
mind loves the unexpected. If you used the dice to choose words did you have the
experience of an idea just ‘popping into your head’? The thoughts I had – Ice
Goddess, Broken Sky and the others – simply just appeared and I didn’t have to try
and make them up at all. This is because in the deeper levels of your mind (what
some people call the subconscious part) information is arranged as a kind of spider-
web, where everything is linked to everything else. Paying attention to words at
random (in this case from the word grid) causes new links to be made or old
connections to be remembered. Such a connection is an idea that appears ‘out of
the blue’.
