[Purple,Violet,Blue]

I wonder if anyone has any experience of this, ie the similarities between these states of being?

I have CPTSD from child abuse and am attempting to be a fiction writer (it's not a new thing. This has pretty much always been a useful escape for me).

I keep looking at this list (below).

During fiction writing, I suppose identity can disappear completely.

But memory doesn't. Trauma gives one excellent recall!

Consciousness? I don't know about that.

Awareness of surroundings... Extremely low. But self, yes. I am intensely connected to all the past me's.

This is one of the definitions of dissociation:

- Dissociation disrupts four areas of personal functioning that usually operate together smoothly, automatically, and with few or no problems:

Identity
Memory
Consciousness
Self-awareness and awareness of surroundings
"Breaks" in this system of automatic functions within yourself cause the symptoms of dissociation.

[Fuzzybear]

I'm sending hugs and love dear Purple

[Purple,Violet,Blue]

Thanks, Fuzzy. I was just thinking out loud, really. On Monday, I found it really hard to get out of the dissociative state I'd been in on my day off (writing). Thought I must have taken a double dose of my meds by mistake, but no. It's not the same as sleepiness...

I had to leave work early, and sleep when I got home.

Normally, I flick in and out of the creative state. Working full time, I have to use breaks, the train journey and so on.

But this time, I could not get out of it.

Weird.

Thanks for listening!

[bide]

Hi Purple,

I know you posted this a while ago, but it is a very interesting question. Would you be willing to elaborate more on what you mean by 'flicking in and out' of a creative state? I do this as well, but it is not as voluntary as I wish it would be!

I found a neat study about the connection between disassociation and creativity, postulating the link through the lens of the sleep-wake cycle. I can't provide the URL until I have more posts, but it is titled "Imagining the impossible before breakfast: the relation between creativity, dissociation, and sleep," if you'd like to give it a read.

I could spend a long time contemplating all the threads that weave into this topic. For example, how divergent thinking, also strongly linked with creative states, might figure into disassociation; or how the concept of 'flow' mimics dissociative states.

In any case, it definitely seems related, and I'd love to hear more of your experience with it, if you are okay with sharing.

[Open Eyes]

Hmmm, that sounds facinating bide, I would really appreciate it if you can get enough posts in if you remember to post the link here. I would like to read it.

Welcome to Psych Central!

[bide]

Will do, @Open Eyes. (that is one post down!)

[bide]

Link to the study, @Open Eyes

Imagining the impossible before breakfast: the relation between creativity, dissociation, and sleep

[Open Eyes]

Did not finish reading all of it. It's very technical and something that may be better digested if read in portions.

I was interested because when I was younger and would work on a painting or something artistic often I zoned out and whatever I did just flowed out of me as though a part of me just took over and did the painting or whatever I was creating for me.

[bide]

Originally Posted by Open Eyes

Did not finish reading all of it. It's very technical and something that may be better digested if read in portions.

I was interested because when I was younger and would work on a painting or something artistic often I zoned out and whatever I did just flowed out of me as though a part of me just took over and did the painting or whatever I was creating for me.

It took me three days to read the entire article - even though it is short. Studies are dense, and if it isn't a 'field of expertise' it can take several reads to understand the content. I'm less interested in the actual study, which was not big enough in scope to be effective, and more interested in the concepts presented.

It discusses dreaming and wakefulness as a cognitive continuum that explains states such as identity loss, loss of environmental awareness, and highly associative thinking as part of the dream state that enhances 'flow' and 'creativity'. This theory could be tweaked a bit, being oversimplified, but still seems to make some intuitive sense for the question about the relationship between disassociation and artistic expression.



The bits that catch my attention the most:

Recent studies have linked dissociative symptoms to vivid dreaming, nightmares, and other unusual sleep experiences (Van der Kloet et al., 2012; Van Heugten–Van der Kloet et al., 2013, 2014). However, the famous 19th century British neurologist Hughlings Jackson was the first to view dissociation as the uncoupling of normal consciousness, which results in what he termed ’the dreamy state’ (Meares, 1999). Interestingly, a century later, Levitan (1967, p. 157) hypothesized that “depersonalization is a compromise state between dreaming and waking.”

[…]

Kahan and LaBerge (1996, 2011) and Kahan et al. (1997) have shown that while there is a reduction in volition in dreaming compared to waking cognition, other properties of thought such as reflective awareness are no more present in waking thought than dreaming. Thus, waking consciousness is capable of the associative thinking thought to be typical of dreaming, and dreaming is capable of the directed and reflexive thinking thought to be typical of waking cognition.

[…]

The perceived world during waking depends on making sense of external sensory input, which engenders a strong sense of external reality in which the ‘self and its inner-world’ exists. In contrast, the world during dreaming makes less distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. A self-organizing system allows for the self and the world in both states to be integrated. Accordingly, when a degree of loss of this self-organization occurs, de-differentation of the waking and dreaming states may ensue, fostering a perception of loss of self, as occurs during episodes of depersonalization.

[…]

Chakravarty (2010) suggests that for creativity to occur, we need to be able to engage in divergent thinking, novelty seeking behavior, and suppress latent inhibition to some extent. Most importantly, a creative brain is highly interconnected (both inter- and intrahemispherically), with divergent thinking promoting more connections to be forged through development of new synapses.

So, 'zoning out' while painting might reflect the influence of a 'highly associative' dream state that enhances creativity. What did those paintings look like? Are they abstract, symbolic, descriptive, literal?

Once, I painted a copy of 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' as an exercise, but I zoned out while doing it... her face ended up looking like mine when I was a young child, with a level of accuracy and detail that didn't seem possible without a reference. It made me wonder how much 'sensory' information I'm storing without knowing it.

I'm still hoping @Purple,Violet,Blue will see this and find some time to reply.

[jtaylor81194]

Well, I definitely experience a similar thing. I seem to switch in and out of these distinct moods, and I find that I can only do certain activities while in each mood. I also do a lot of writing (mainly fiction), and I find that unless I'm in my creative mood, I can't get anything out. I also have a social mood and an exhausted mood. These last two moods can get very extreme, like so exhausted that I can barely move my body (and spend the whole day in bed, not even watching TV or anything--just lying down) or so energetic that I CANNOT sit still. Sometimes these moods last days, and sometimes they last hours. I don't seem to have any control over which mood I slip into, but it always seems to be one of these three (quiet and creative, social and energetic, or exhausted and sad). Although I can't consciously pick out which zone I'm in, they do tend to be triggered by external events (most of the time). If something exciting happened, I tend to slip into my social mood; if past trauma gets triggered, I exclusively slip into my exhausted state (at least once the initial hypersensitive/paranoid/jumpy state goes away). I don't know if other people experience something similar, but I'd be really interested to find out.