Internal dialog, which I referred to in the previous post, is when you talk to yourself inside your head. Not like, “What do you think my imaginary friend?” “I think you should steal the money” “No I can’t do that” “Do it, you wimp!” “No, no, make them stop! Make them stop!” No, I mean the movie voice. The VO voice which describes the things you’re thinking. Once I became aware of its presence, I started to realize that it was putting things into words exactly as I would have said them. This struck me as a huge waste of time. Thoughts don’t need to be restricted to words, do they? So I tried to get rid of the words and just think in thoughts. It worked, and much faster. It was like my thoughts were free to leap and bound across ideas.
The trouble was, without words to be tied down to, it was sometimes difficult to explain your thoughts without a lot of backtracking. When they came out, they didn’t always make sense. It was like a dream, where it makes so much sense when you’re in it, but absolutely none when you wake up and tell someone about it. But was it the thoughts which didn’t make sense, or our language which was tied down in such a way as to blind us from possibility? George Orwell noted in the Appendix to 1984 that it was possible to change language so as to forbid certain thoughts. Yet, were we without language, we would be severely limited in our ability to order our thoughts. It’s a bit of a pickle.
I suppose the solution is a combination of both types of thinking. If you write a story in your head, but don’t write it down, you may lose important details. Same with thinking without words. You will leap ahead and let your mind run free, but don’t forget to make the thoughts concrete once in a while by putting them into words.
There may well be a huge reserve of potential inside all of us. The night before last, I was dreaming about walking next to a river. I heard a complex piece of piano music in the dream, complete with melody and harmony, which then I identified as a piece by Rachmaninoff. It was beautiful, and yet when I awoke I wondered how I had remembered such a piece of music so completely. I couldn’t remember how it went, nor what all the chords were. I couldn’t hum it or decide the key it was in, but in sleep it had been complete, as though someone were playing it on a piano next to me. What really got me wondering was whether it was actually a piece by Rachmaninoff at all or something I had thought of myself.
It’s true that when skills become so practiced, they will fuse with your mind, allowing you to use them at will to paint the pictures in your mind. That skill could be language, a musical instrument or a paintbrush. However, while they bring those thoughts to life, they are bound by the level of skill you have with which to convey them and the medium in which they are conveyed.
Something to ponder.
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