What Happens When the Mind Lets Go? | Will Dowd
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What happens when the rational mind steps aside—and something less predictable takes its place?
Writer Will Dowd explores the strange territory between waking and sleeping, where the mind makes unexpected connections and the internal editor begins to relax. His new collection, The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, grew out of a year-long experiment using MIT’s Dormio dream-incubation technology to seed his dreams with fragments of literature and then capture what emerged.
We talk about hypnagogia, the creative possibilities of dreams, the surprising sophistication of the “inner dream weaver,” and the challenge of translating dream logic into stories without losing what made the experience so strange. Along the way, Will considers why dreams can feel authored but not entirely by us—and why he thinks of himself less as the sole author of these stories than as a co-writer with a mysterious other self.
It is a conversation about creativity, consciousness, and what might emerge when we loosen our grip on making sense.
Five Key Topics Covered
Dreams & Creativity
Hypnagogia (transitional state from wakefulness to sleep)
Dream Incubation
Consciousness & the Creative Mind
Writing from Dreams
“I’ve always been awed by dreams because of the way that they feel so authored, but not by you. This is a mystery author.”
Connect with Will: Website · Book · LinkedIn
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