color from the filter that just looks at facts. I chose the black
ink to represent the critic. Black is a serious, heavy color for me
(and for lots of other people), so I switch to the black ink when I
am writing the thoughts of the critic. I use green to represent
the gentler, tender side of myself—the innocent side, the playful
child. Green is a color I associate with spring and flowers and
new life, so this fits for me. Sometimes when journaling I will check
in with this playful side of myself just to give it some attention
and see if it needs anything. It’s hard to be creative if you are
starving this part of yourself. One writer/consultant I know calls
this part of himself “the kid in the basement.” He will figuratively
“toss” projects down the stairs to this creative kid to see what
he comes up with. Often he is astonished by the freshness of the
“kid’s” ideas.
If all this sounds weird to you, then I suggest there’s a whole
side to your creativity that you haven’t explored. (I learned all this
stuff on board the Mother Ship after I was abducted... ) Watterson,
author of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, attributes his success
to this inner dialogue process. He wrote in the preface to his last
book that he let his characters “write their own material. I put
them in situations and listen to them.” Calvin’s answers were things
that Watterson, the adult, would never have thought of. In any
event, I use the green to capture the responses from my own inner
Calvin.
The color red I reserve for dreams. Many sages from many
different traditions have said that dreams are messages directly from
the Creator. The literature about creative geniuses is rife with ex-
amples of breakthroughs that resulted from dreams. An example
is Kekulé, who proposed the ring structure of the benzene mol-
ecule after he saw a snake grabbing its own tail in a dream. Edison’s
acknowledgment of the importance of dreams was mentioned
earlier; he used the rocks-and-pans procedure for waking himself
from the dream state so that he could capture those insights.
My own experience with dreams has been noteworthy andGetting Personal 21714-25 ware 217 1/19/01, 1:16 PM