Mapping Out Ideas

Sometimes you know where you're going, and other times, you wander around until it all makes sense in retrospect.

While there are many things in life that are pointless and there is no excuse or justification for them, some things make a lot of sense. Some journeys, some discussions, some books, some ideas, some undertakings make a lot of sense. They have a theme or purpose, they are rich with meaning.

The question is whether that was planned or accidental. I was telling Andrea about how Stephen King's Gunslinger series took over 30 years for him to write and in the end was all tied together and made sense. In fact, it tied many of his other books together and made them all make a greater sense. How could you hold a plan together in your mind for 20 years while you wrote it all out and described it? The answer in this case is that Stephen King didn't. When he got in his accident in 1999, he had just recently restarted his efforts in writing the Gunslinger series. He had completed the 4th in what would eventually be 7 books in the series. The accident left him in pain and uncomfortable. I had recently read the 4th book and was anxiously awaiting more when I heard an interview where Stephen King admitted that the accident had taken a lot out of him and that he did not have any idea how to finish the series. Yet when it was finished, 5 years after the accident, it was complete in a way that few stories are. Everything was tied in and meshed together, every element was essential in making the completed whole.

So the question is, was it planned or accidental? If it was accidental, how did it later make such sense, as if it was planned?

This is not just a phenomenon with this one book, this is analogous to what happens in many situations. Whether ideas are embedded in our subconscious and we aren't aware of them until we flesh them out, or whether working on an idea is a matter of uncovering some underlying truth inherent in the universe doesn't really matter. What is important here is that you understand and comprehend the totality of something once you have fully mapped it out.

I remember describing to Andrea how people in the age of discovery were always making maps of the world. If they didn't know something firsthand, they would gloss over it. It's amazing how often they got the broad strokes right when they were completely clueless about the details. How is that possible? We also talked about how some trips we take can easily be described by some theme or unifying purpose after we return, when the intent when we set out was nothing near that conclusion.

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in dreams. I could describe it as Dream Idea Packets. You may have noticed in a dream when you entered a new location or started a new activity in a dream and you already knew the backstory. In your dream, it was already in your mind, a memory of all the stuff that led up to that point, although you didn't dream it in realtime, it didn't unravel slowly, it burst forth as a complete nugget of memory. These little dream packets are sort of like zip files. Back when everything was dial-up on computers, and memory was short, you sometimes compressed files into zip files so they would take up less room. Sometimes you zipped several files into a single compressed file, taking up a fraction of the space of the original material. When you got a compressed file and opened it up (unzipped it) it was sort of like a flower blooming. All this information that was compressed into a little kernel. Actually, that is a lot like a flower blooming or a seed sprouting. All the potential for the whole plant or flower is already in the seed or bud, and then it opens up and unfurls and becomes complete. Or was it already complete when it was in the seed or bud or zipped file?

Are ideas like that? Do we have kernels of ideas already in our head and they only await the proper fertilizer, sun, water, or motivation to sprout?