Writing in the "Creative Sweet Spot"

What science says about what the liminal mind brings to our writing

Hi Mindful Writers,

There’s a place you visit twice every single day (more if you’re a napper!) — once as you fall asleep, once as you wake. It lasts only a few minutes. Most of us pass through it without even noticing.

Science is now calling it a “creative sweet spot”. I’ve been calling it the bardo.

It’s the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep — that strange, half-dissolved, liminal place where the edges of our thoughts go soft, images arrive unbidden, and the thinking that usually chatters away in our minds falls briefly, blissfully, silent.

You know it. It’s the place where the idea you couldn’t quite get to appears fully formed. Where a character suddenly speaks. Where the structure of something you’ve been wrestling with shows itself. Where profound insights come to you. Where you know that this 3D world and 3D body is not all there is.

Neurologically, here’s what’s happening: as you drift toward sleep, the fast beta waves of active thought give way to slower alpha and theta rhythms. The prefrontal cortex — home of the inner critic, the editor, the self-censoring voice — goes quiet. But crucially, your memory, imagery, and associative networks stay active, weaving recent experience with loosely-connected memories in ways your rational waking mind would never permit.

Researchers call this a “hybrid, semi-lucid state.” You’re removed enough from external reality to watch your mind wander freely, but not so deep that you’re not conscious of it. You can witness your own imagination without managing it.

That’s the window. And it’s extraordinarily brief — just three to five minutes — but a 2021 study in Science Advances found that as little as fifteen seconds in this state is enough to significantly increase creative insight. Once you drift past it into deeper sleep, the effect vanishes. The threshold itself is the creative sweet spot.

What makes this particularly interesting for us as writers — and why I’ve been thinking about it so much lately — is what researchers found when they brought fiction writers and poets into this territory deliberately.

In studies conducted at the University of Swansea, poets who engaged with hypnagogic imagery showed measurable improvement in emotional and symbolic expression, and reported stronger states of flow. Fiction writers who entered the liminal state to work on their stories found something even more striking: characters who had been silent began to speak. One participant described returning to her story world in this state and slowly building a relationship with a protagonist who refused to communicate in waking hours — until, in the liminal space, she opened up and changed the direction of the novel entirely.

I’ve experienced this myself, many times. Not always as I’m falling asleep, but in the softer awareness that contemplative practices cultivate — Yoga Nidra (which specifically works with this state and is the art of extending it), qigong, meditation, the kind of slow morning writing that happens before the analytical mind fully wakes. There’s something different happening in those times when I am not in my usual day-to-day mode.

MIT and Harvard researchers took this further in 2023, developing a device called Dormio that detects when sleepers enter the hypnagogic stage. They primed participants to dream about a specific image — a tree — just as they crossed the threshold. Those who dreamed in that liminal space performed significantly better on creativity tests afterwards and the more they incorporated the image into their drowsy dreaming, the more creative their responses became.

In other words: you can consciously plant a seed at the threshold, and trust the liminal mind to do something with it that the waking mind cannot.

Dalí knew this. He slept in a chair holding a key, letting himself drift until the moment he dropped it — waking instantly to capture whatever had arisen. Edison did the same with steel balls. Both of them were practicing a form of liminal awareness that contemplative traditions have mapped for thousands of years.

Yoga Nidra works with exactly this territory. So does deep meditation. So, in its own way, does the kind of open, unhurried writing practice that I’ve been writing about and teaching for the past three years. Where the focus isn’t about producing and counting words and publication credits, but about exploring and listening and discovering.

The bardo teachings in Tibetan Buddhism speak of the threshold not just as the space between death and rebirth and sleep and waking, but between any two states: before and after loss, before and after transformation, the in-between that we usually rush through because it feels like nothing is happening.

Writing the Bardo is built around this liminal space being where the writing that we need to do is waiting for us.

Starting this month and running until the end of November, we’ll work with the creative and contemplative practices that help you consciously enter and inhabit your own deep consciousness. We’ll bring somatic awareness, dream work, and the kind of slow, unguarded attention that the hypnagogic research confirms our writing minds genuinely need.

If you’re moving through a transition — in your life, your writing, your sense of who you are as a writer — and you want to write from that place rather than around it, I’d love for you to be part of this.

We begin on 16th June. The application deadline is 10th June and our first writing and Yoga Nidra session is 23rd June. The course is currently more than half full and there are just 6 spaces left to join us. So far we have writers from three continents coming together to explore the liminal.

With love,

Amanda 💙