Consciousness and Book Ideas
I have been jotting down book ideas for at least a decade. Frequently these ideas come to me in dreams or in very quiet moments when I’m not necessarily reaching for a creative thought (in the shower, doing laundry, driving). Though surely there are triggers in the world around me, I’m finding more and more that my book ideas seem to come from a more “plugged in” part of my brain.
I understand that to some, this is going to sound… strange.
Maybe even a little like science fiction itself.
But I’ve grown fascinated by the formation of these ideas and the more I explore the concept, the more connections I find that excite and validate the thought that ideas aren’t always found, they are given.
Consciousness in My Work
Consciousness is one of the cornerstones of my fiction. I’m fascinated by the way our minds seem to be both interconnected and independent. It comes up almost all the time for me.
At my core, I believe we are all a part of a boundless consciousness that is not limited by time and space.
As a science fiction author, that means time travel and space exploration take on a very ethereal role. I’m not really interested in the “hop in a vessel and off you go” approach. I love the idea that our memories, our history, our emotions and a collective understanding has a far greater propulsion than any fuel known to man.
So you’ll see this idea come up again and again in my work. (It’s in The Luxury of Time Travel, my debut novel and in Terminal Lucidity, my free novelette.)
Consciousness in Idea Generating
When it comes to my ideas, the part of this process that gets really strange is that I’ve never started from the idea of exploring consciousness. When I was in my early twenties I had an idea that psychics and time travel could have some sort of interplay. I didn’t think much of it other than, that would be fun and cool to explore in narrative. So for years, I took a stab at a first draft. Clunky and not all together cohesive I hammered out a finished manuscript.
It needed a lot of work.
One of the areas where it needed work was in the “science” part of the science fiction. I’m not a “hard” science fiction writer, but I like there to be at least some order and some reason behind the elements I explore.
Let’s face it though… psychics tend to me more affiliated with magic. And time travel is rarely given serious consideration outside black holes/wormholes.
In truth, I didn’t really think there was a real scientific element to explore. I thought all the science was going to have to be imaginary “future science” to explain away the magic.
Then by chance I was listening to a podcast that typically had very little to do with science or writing. On the “Don’t Keep Your Day Job” show, Mark Gober began talking about his book An End to Upside Down Thinking.
And there it was. Not only a loose explanation for how time travel and the mind could cooperate. But how psychic ability plays a role in tapping into a deeper use and understanding of consciousness.
From that discovery on, The Luxury of Time Travel took on a whole new life force. Instead of a loose concept that sputtered along, there was a solid foundation.
Beyond Coincidence
At first it was easy to look at the discovery of that podcast and the Mark Gober book as mere coincidence. I thought, “Wow, how lucky was that?” But that was just the beginning of this journey.
As I obsessively consumed all different kinds of media on this subject I began to realize that not only was I onto something, but I was enjoying an awakening and realization in the process.
Furthermore, as it turned out, other book ideas I had began to strongly tie in. And not just on the subject of psychics and time travel.
Aliens, faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel, communing with the dead, NDE’s, karma, meditation, levitation, teleporting, lucid dreaming and more!
I have been like a kid on Christmas discovering all these loose threads. And I can’t imagine not including these themes in most (if not all) my work in the future. And I will definitely keep sharing my resources for the fiction I write because I think it’s something we can all benefit from learning and growing in.
The ideas for fiction that I have hold a place in the real world. And the strange development of ideas that later prove to have real world validity give me this feeling that what pops to mind isn’t random. And it isn’t always fiction. Fiction is the vehicle I enjoy using, but my fascination with these topics just grows the more I read the very real accounts that validate them.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic explores the concept that if you don’t grab on to an idea, it can skip you and move on to someone else. You hear artists all the time talk about having a “story that was just like that one” in mind. I don’t think it’s an accident. I think the universe, however you see it, wants certain concepts shared and often those ideas are dropped into the minds of artists and scientists and spiritual leaders.
Consciousness in Science Fiction
Now I’m not going to pretend to be the only or first sci-fi author to explore consciousness. I’m far from it. I have been consuming stories like this for a long time, I just never realized that consciousness was the common thread given how varied the story around it can be.
A few of my favorites:
Dark Matter and Recursion by Blake Crouch
Arrival (both the movie and the short story by Ted Chiang)
Inception and Interstellar by Christopher Nolan
The OA by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij
It’s actually super common to find subjects of the mind overlapping with the topics we commonly associate with sci-fi.
Why Consciousness Matters
Did you know “What is consciousness?” is one of the top unanswered questions in science? Yeah. Scientists don’t know where it comes from. They are in no way decided that the brain generates it. In fact, they feel pretty sure it doesn’t. How crazy is that?
It’s important to explore because it is unanswered. And because we are all plugged into it. It could hold our past and our future. It could solve global issues we are fighting to understand. It is a key to our mortality and the afterlife. It is the intangible everything of our Universe.
How could we not spend more time on this?