Mine your mind V: Sleep on it.

It can be scary how effective this is.

Yes it really works.

BUT, what is the best way to get your unleashed dreaming mind to attack a complex problem for a creative solution?

My wife Brenda and Melody my oldest daughter as a baby, problem solving.

I spoke with Luisa Motten (South Seattle Community College) who has a method that works very well for her, and for many others. As we plowed into a delicious lunch in her sunny garden in West Seattle she said something like:

"If I really have a problem, it's probably on my mind all day. I naturally just fall asleep thinking about it. I don't necessarily remember dreaming about it, but my problem is routinely solved by the time my alarm goes off"

Simple enough.

Step 1: Think about it all day long.

Step 2: Sleep on it.

Step 3. A solution produces itself wihtout any concerted effort on your part!

In a video I embedded in an earlier post, I discovered John Cleese saying something very similar.

Click forward to watch 26:00 - 26:45 if you care to see someone else say the same thing, but on a video.

Luisa told me that any problem is solvable this way.

"I was in college and a calculus problem was eluding me, I had to get to sleep so I could wake up for class the next day. I wouldn't have expected such a complicated problem to be something the sleeping mind could handle. I slept on it. The next morning I woke up and it all made sense! It seemed so simple that I actually asked myself if I had really been struggling with the problem in the first place."

The circumstances were perfect... She meditated on the problem, probably outlining all of the intricate details, then hit the sack.

Try that on your next big conundrum!