Dreams, Dracula and Creativity

Great ideas sometimes come from a good sleep – a dream, or even the period between wakefulness and sleep.

It's Halloween, and a good time to note the mysterious way that we're sometimes inspired during dreams and semi-sleep. In fact you can credit dreams for two of our best-known Halloween images – Frankenstein and Dracula.

Mary Shelley wrote about how a dream helped inspire her vision for Frankenstein:

“When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”


Bram Stoker’s Dracula arose from a similar well of creative power, according to his biographer, Harry Ludlam, who said the inspiration came from a dream in which Stoker saw:

"’a vampire king rising from the tomb to go about his ghastly business.’" This dream was reportedly brought on "from a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper." It was the dream that led Stoker to research extensively Balkan vampire legends, basing Dracula upon Vlad Tepes the Impaler, a fifteenth-century Transylvanian ruler also known as "Dracula," or, "Son of the Devil."

Creative opportunities also come during hypnagogia, the dreamlike state experienced as a person is falling asleep or waking up.


Andreas Mavromatis wrote “Hypnagogia: the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep.” She reports that Thomas Edison, when reaching a sticking point in his research, would take a cat-nap to tap his creative power. He would hold steel balls in his hand, and when he fell asleep the balls would fall into a pan. It's said he would often wake up with an idea to continue his project.

More of us could tap the power of dreams and semi-wakefulness if we remembered two points:

First, dreams are perishable. As lucid as an idea may seem at the time, it’s not remembered later on. So a dream diary or a creative journal kept on the nightstand can help preserve those ideas. It’s good to use a felt-tip pen for ease of writing, and the light from a clock-radio nearby so that the result can be read in the morning.

Second, any idea is only the starting point. Hours of writing and polishing lay ahead to turn it into something useful.

Edison knew this. As he famously said, genius is only 1 percent inspiration – and 99 percent perspiration.

What's the source of your inspiration? How do you get ideas? And once you have them, how do you make sure to develop the good ones?

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Is "Paranormal" the new normal?

Scene from the creepy, intense "Paranormal Activity."


News accounts suggest that the spooky new thriller “Paranormal Activity” is on track to become one of the year’s most profitable films because ticket sales are strong and the movie cost only $15,000 (some stories say $10,000) to make.

“A month ago, few people outside of Paramount and select cities knew about "Paranormal Activity," Advertising Age says. But producers changed that “by letting consumers play distribution chief, and taking more than a few cues from the 'Blair Witch Project' playbook.”

It makes sense that the cost of production would directly affect a film’s profitability – the lower the cost, the greater the potential profit. But should the cost affect our perception of the movie’s quality – that is, should we judge a $10,000 film on a different scale than a blockbuster made on a megamillion-dollar budget?

Here according to published news accounts are the top five films with the largest recorded budgets:

- Spider-Man 3 (2007) $255 million (Internet Movie Database)

- King Kong (2005) $207 million (BBC)

- Superman Returns (2006) $204 million (Entertainment Weekly, others)

- Titanic (1997) $200 million (USA Today)

- Spider-Man 2 (2004) $200 million (IMDB.com)


At that cost relative to “Paranormal,” should Spider Man offer 25,000 times the entertainment value?

Director Peter Jackson’s 2005 take on the King Kong saga was “the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year,” Rolling Stone reported. Roger Ebert called it “magnificent entertainment.”

What would you expect, for something that costs 21,000 times this new flick?

That’s not fair, of course. Still, one gauge of success – how far along the scale toward “Big-C” creativity that produces lasting works of art – ought to be a measure of the inputs.

That’s the implicit agreement that users of most online video make – the lower quality (but getting better) image is sometimes offset by “real,” raw engaging content.

“Paranormal” makes the same bargain with its audience. Because it’s “real” we don’t expect expensive production values. But we still buy into the narrative, jump out of our chairs and feel the chills because the film works exactly as it’s supposed to, delivering the same jolt that other films spend millions achieving as it taps the flight-or-fight neurocircuitry that makes a bump in the night so alarming.
Superheros take a bit more explanation, not to mention CGI.

Like “The Blair Witch Project” before it, “Paranormal” benefits from a rough documentary style. Another example from this genre is the low-budget (of course) Vietnam War drama, “84 Charlie MoPic,” the Army name for a combat photographer.

A better way to compare inputs and quality would be with films using traditional, non-doc storytelling.

Some of the most intriguing films from some of the best-loved directors were low-budget efforts. “American Graffiti” from George Lucas cost less than $1 million in 1973 ($4.8 million in 2008 dollars). Lucas’ less-known 1971 effort “THX 1138” is on many of these lists, including:
“Seven Best Ultra-Low Budget Films Ever Made,” and “Small Budget, Big Box-Office Bling”

Here’s a look at some great low-budget successes:

- “Blair Witch Project” Cost, $35,000; Gross, $296 million
- “Napoleon Dynamite” Cost, $400,000; Gross, $46 million
- “Slumdog Millionaire” Cost, $15 million; Gross, $364 million
(Source: TheNumbers.com box office data; Wikipedia)

A fair guess is that moviegoers are far more immersed in the story on any given film than in the balance sheet. It matters enormously to the producers, so we can expect more doc-style devices used to make cheap films. (Can a YouTube-based storyline be far behind?)

Nothing changes in the number that matters most to moviegoers, however:

The price at the ticket counter remains the same.

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Quick tour of sociology

Melinda Messineo, associate professor of sociology, gave us a short course in her discipline, from social class to structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism.

Augusta Comte helped found the study of sociology, believing that scholars could use the scientific method to study human groups.

Comte’s ideas became what the social sciences now refer to as positivism – described by anthropologist Edmund Leach as “the view that serious scientific inquiry should not search for ultimate causes deriving from some outside source but must confine itself to the study of relations existing between facts which are directly accessible to observation.”

In regard to creativity, we talked about the idea of periphery, one’s relationship to a social network. One idea, Messineo said, is that artists and creative types are frequently found on the periphery of society – not in the “connected core.”

“They are aware that change is occurring because they’re not constrained by the rules,” she said.

Some of the best work in that area has been done by sociologist Michael P. Farrell, who studied the French Impressionists, among others, in his landmark “Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work.”

We discussed the relationship between social class and parenting styles. People of higher socioeconomic status use more affirming statements to their children than reprimands; they read more to them and ask more complex, abstract, critical-thinking questions when talking to children about what they’ve read.

Messineo talked about social capital, the non-financial assets that involve educational, social and intellectual knowledge that are part of the socialization process.

“Your family is your primary source of social capital when you’re young,” she said. “The higher amount of social capital you have, the more opportunities you have and the higher likelihood for creativity in your life.”

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Further your affiant sayeth not

Billions of written text and email messages aside, the Web looks to be bad for the printed word.

Multimedia, video, interactive graphics get all the attention. Books, if they're mentioned at all, are usually discussed in the context of some tech breakthrough - the Kindle electronic reader, for example.

Will words matter by the time we've turned everything to pixels?

A vision of the text-hostile present gets humorous treatment in The New Yorker's Oct. 19 "Shouts & Murmurs," a fictional publishing-house memo to a new author from a young woman who explains: "I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department..."

"To start: Do you blog?" she asks in preparing for their promotional campaign.

"We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld... Make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent."

The barrage of social media esoterica makes the point that publishing now operates on such thin margins that the company's entire promotion department has been outsourced to an intern who's unclear exactly what book she is promoting.

People like the fictional young intern are "digital natives" in these buzzword-happy times.

The National Endowment for the Arts reported in a study two years ago that only 38 percent of adults said they regularly read for pleasure. The endowment said nearly two-thirds of college freshmen in 2005 said they did little or no pleasure reading.

Reading and writing increasingly occur in 140-character Twitter-bites. Argumentation or narration, not exposition, are often the preferred forms of discourse.

Some tweets use compressed narrative forms. Taken together, the messages from a venue form a telling description of the scene.

One of those narratives came from an Indianapolis beer garden recently in a series of Twitter messages sent by one of the group.

The gathering was livened by one member who grew increasingly chatty and loud.

The Twitter account, written by a former courts reporter, mentioned the patron by name. But there were few specifics. Instead, the former reporter used a boilerplate expression sometimes found in probable-cause affidavits signed by police investigators - known as affiants when they are making a sworn statement.

The answer was an inside joke to lawyers, cops and courthouse veterans:

So what all happened during the rowdy gathering?

"Further your affiant sayeth not."

- By John Strauss, jcstrauss@bsu.edu

Born to be Mild