The Vanishing Window

How to capture dream-state awareness in focused writing

Every night brings dreams, and every morning there’s an ever-vanishing window of time during which those dreams can make the leap of faith, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade style, from the cloud of supraconscious direct experience into present focused attention, and potentially then into long-term storage.

That’s the quality I want in my writing. Right there in the first draft, ink still wet. To show you what I mean, I need to first show you the three ways attention shows up in writing, and why two of them kill what’s alive on the page.

The point is how you focus

You can write different ways. You can write absentmindedly, for starters. When the writing is not in any way about the language or subtext or the present moment, this is the kind of writing output that AI will grow to become competitive against. Absentminded means relying on tropes and the aggregate of things you’ve said before—how it’s said versus how the moment lives right now.

First mode: Autopilot

This type of written content tends to have a kind of flow, but it’s the sort of flow that’s like how you could drive all the way to work without really being aware of any specific thing you’re doing while you drive. A thousand chained perceptions, a thousand sequenced actions, a ton of steel hurtling down the road at 70 miles per hour, but what’s playing in your mind is the theme song to Green Acres.

Absentminded writing is mediocre writing. If anything, absentminded writing is about simply getting from A to B. There’s less presence in it. It carries few surprises.

The thing is, we’ve all written this way. You can feel it when you reread something. There’s nobody there.

So if autopilot doesn’t work, what about the opposite? What about being deliberately, consciously present? This is where most people reach for mindfulness. And this is where things get interesting, because mindfulness, at least how it’s usually practiced, might be worse than autopilot.

Second mode: Self-monitoring

As I’ve seen it performed, mindfulness seems to just involve people running some kind of internal process in tandem with their actions that monitors what they’re doing. I’m not convinced that mindfulness is all it’s cracked up to be.

A mindful person might just be one who is metacognitively observing. Because they’re spending extra resources on self-observation, somehow the mindful person gives off the impression that they’re an alien trying to pass as human. They’re mindful in that it’s taking more effort for them to do things that could otherwise flow.

Mindfulness and social awkwardness share some ground.

Here’s why this matters for writing: when you’re monitoring yourself write, you split your attention. Part of you is writing, part of you is watching yourself write, maybe even narrating it: “Okay, I’m being really present now, I’m noticing my breath, I’m choosing my words carefully...” Meanwhile, nothing alive is happening on the page.

This applies beyond writing, by the way. You see this pattern in the person at the party who’s so busy being “present” they’re actually absent, the musician who’s monitoring their technique instead of playing, the lover who’s performing presence instead of being present. The distinction matters.

So not autopilot, not mindfulness. What then? What I’m talking about is a kind of focus that doesn’t split your attention but concentrates it. Instead of dividing your attention to watch yourself, you funnel everything into a single point. All of you, right there in the moment.

Third mode: Concentrated presence

So it’s focus, then?

What I mean is awareness. Or maybe “open focus”—but that sounds like a rehab center or an app the innies in Severance would be triggered by.

Write in such a way that you bring to bear your whole being into the moment. Or at least the pointy end of it. The end that can hold a pencil and press keys, primate-like, as it resonates within a corporeal form that sits wholly occupied—we must be grateful—by chiefly metabolic processes. Possessor of the alimentary canal, governor of many mitochondrial processes, wizard of ATP and calcium channel something-somethings. To say nothing of the constant neural storms, the winds of thought and voltages of cognition, the missed connections of ever more reaching toward comprehension of what is in fact an ephemeral passing.

The passing itself serving as one coordinate on the being that is brought to bear with its pointy end in the moment of giving shape to inner experience through the wizardry of language and symbolic forms.

How fully can you muster your focus right into the moment? Funnel it all so that the pointy end of consciousness takes the shape of the words on the page as you write them.

People talk about having focus, but more should be said about really mustering focus, bringing to bear even the negative capability of your being into what you’re doing.

Think about how you experience dreams before they fade. Your focus is on the feeling, the experience. You’re wholly receptive. This is what I mean by bringing the dream-state into writing. You’re totally vulnerable to the experience of the dream. That total immersion without self-presentation is the quality we’re after.

Where writing differs (and where it’s alike)

Focused writing is not conversation, but it becomes more like conversation in ways that are too easy to disregard.

In conversation, so much passes—body language, microgesture, the gutterally real potential of two or more human forms in bodily proximity in the shared effort to communicate. Whereas in writing, unfortunately, this same reading of the other gets ignored. In the moment of doodling letters, there would seem to be no other.

But the other is there on the other side of the transcribed experience. And the other is there in the transcription.

This other is the shadow or mirror of the writer’s attentiveness to the moment of creation. And that’s not you, not directly. You’re not exactly writing to yourself, but you are there in the writing of it. And although this sounds like some trivial nuance to say, a rounding error in the calculus of scribbling with a pencil, I think it’s vital.

Vital in the sense that attention is a light that shines from the living self into the thing it’s doing, which in this case is writing.

So we have three modes now: absent (autopilot), divided (mindful), and concentrated (open focus). The last one is where things get interesting, where writing becomes performance in the best sense.

What this looks like in practice

Presence happens and gets recorded because writing, like other art forms and opportunities to experience flow, provides both some stability—an easy opportunity to perform something automatically which nevertheless requires consistent engagement—and also unlimited potential. Anything at all could happen. There’s some anxiety in this, some potential to strike fear in the heart of the poor writer—the “will I write nothing good,” the performance aspect of it.

A performance is always unexpected and alive. The moment brings with it any possible outcome.

So this is the “open focus” of it, if you will. Openness describes the potential for it to be a vessel of something that flows, something you could do and have the doing done automatically. The focus of it is the performance. The dancing jazz. The sand thrown on the windshield in a storm. The phrase that turns unexpectedly. The alchemical change that happens within the writer.

To substitute mere mindfulness, if mindfulness is just some sort of self-monitoring, would mean a loss. What substance can meta-awareness have compared with actually being there, a force in the moment. Being in the hot seat, and choosing to put yourself there, because that’s where the unexpected happens. That’s where phrases get turned. Because you’re actually on the spot, admitting you can’t know, and speeding toward knowing.

Why morning is the window

What does bringing full focus and attention to writing look like? The inner awareness is directed into the moment, at what’s precisely been written as it’s being written, with an eye both for what just happened and what’s to come.

For me, it’s where the phrase becomes visceral and alive, and where language is as much shapes, geometric patterns and forms, connective strata, as it is something that is spelled out, rhythmic and gutteral.

This is where writing becomes capable of carrying within it the quality of attention that created it. The presence of the writer is there and able to be felt in the writing. The writer feels it. The reader feels it too.

When you’re truly present in the writing moment, you’re focused. You’re not performing mindfulness. You’re not just monitoring yourself non-judgmentally from some safe observational distance. You’re right there in the thick of it, vulnerable to and able to be affected by whatever wants to emerge.

This is why the morning matters. In that window between dreaming and fully waking, you haven’t started monitoring yourself yet. You’re too drowsy for self-consciousness. You’re not yet clicked-in enough to be on autopilot. You’re in that rare state where all of you can show up in the writing without division. And you only get a few minutes of it before your day’s machinery kicks in and you start living from memory instead of truth. That’s the vanishing window.

---

I love helping writers go deeper with their writing projects. If you’d like to work with me as your writing coach, reach out here.

The Understory

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. I’ll start off each week, and anyone who likes is welcome to contribute something of their own. Just post it as a comment or in the chat.

Here’s a draft I remember writing after learning all the cool words we have for the parts of a shoe. There’s really a complete vocabulary for describing the whole geography of a shoe or boot or moccasin. Really, think about it. There’s cheek, heel, eye, sole, tongue, lace and on and on. And it makes me nostalgic for a world that was more embodied. To have such a complete mapping for the parts of something as common as a shoe means that we really spent time with those objects because we needed a way to describe and engage with them. Nowadays, we’re spending less time engaging with the tactile world, and all of our new words are just sort of meme-based or else stem from something tech related.

Some people take their job as them

So there’s this meme called a dickbutt
and it is what it sounds like
it’s a dicklike tube that has a butt
or is a butt coming out of a dick
with one
or just is one with both
as part of what it is

anyway it’s out there on the internet
and some people are like that
with their jobs
they take their job seriously
or more to the point
they take it to be them
as in
they are them
is their job is them
they are who their job says is them
“you sir are a plumber”

the baby is born as neither a boy nor a girl it’s
a plumber, a senior engineer,
it’s a dickbutt
of a someday life partner, it

is maybe
they are maybe
who they are

/

consider how
it is normal now to receive “notification sounds”
which is a whole class of
application-driven annoyance

“honey silence your notifications”
whereas formerly we in the village
would refer descriptively to the regions of a shoe

and say the tongue or heel or cheek or eye,
referring to something on a piece of foot leather
related to the insole or arch

whereas all our names newly coined lately
i would say
tend to be, fair to predict,

will be application-related
product and device specific
as even “your device”

is about as meaningful
as attributing your eternal and changing sense of self
to a profile on a corporate application

and corporations
to be honest
are or have eaten the world

are people
which is to say a man can’t go to a beach
anywhere but greenland

and with a shovel
dig down a few feet

without eventually turning up
a stone that has been handled by
jim in accounting

jim being a kind of stone
that works in accounting
and which you could bet your life
somewhere on it--
or him, I mean, on jim

which some of these are still small or subtle
(you have to have the eye for this)
but they’re growing

corporate logos
like the mark of the beast
you’ll find it applied somewhere on its device
on jim

just like the button in the middle
is the home button
but where it takes you
isn’t exactly anywhere

so call it a
white whale of a button
whales being after all
a name for
large bitcoin holders

and money something to work for
which if it’s not also working for you
suffers inflation
which we know ends in
what you’d call
correction

Feel free to share your work-in-progress draft here in the comments (just post it as a comment) or the chat: