So I did manage to write this morning and get to my flight lesson on time, albeit largely by luck. I had forgotten what day it was, and I set the 6:00 AM alarm for June 19th. This morning being the 18th, the alarm didn’t sound. But some combination of daylight and heat must have kicked in–yay summer!–and I was nevertheless awake and writing by 6:20. With the bonus of falling asleep briefly during the exercise and typing some really interesting sentences while unconscious.

But wait. Did I say luck?

Hmm. About that….

My Dad’s a pediatrician. Aside from seeing patients at his office, he also does the rounds at various New Orleans area hospitals. Most of his hospital days have him up and out of the house before dawn. The weird thing is, though, he rarely needs an alarm clock for this. Often, he can simply think to himself, “Four o’clock,” as he goes to sleep, or “6:00 AM” as the case may be, and, bing! next morning his eyes will pop open at two minutes or so before the designated hour.

This always struck me as no less than magic. It certainly isn’t luck. Luck isn’t reproducible. This is. I think I reproduced it this morning.

So how does it work? Simple: by the power of–

(Grayskull! …No.)

By the power of the imagination.

In mental effort we are likely to go still more widely astray from some childish notion that it is laudable to exert that “slow, dead have of the will” as often as possible. But in changing habits, you will find yourself getting your results far more quickly and with less “backwash” if you engage your imagination in the process.

Shortly after Brande introduces this notion (Becoming a Writer, pp. 62-63), she proves her point with a suggested exercise involving a dangling needle. By merely visualizing the path you’d like the needle to follow, you can make it swing on its string accordingly. Magic? In this case, not so much. Just the power of suggestion causing minute unconscious movements in the hand holding the string.

You can change habits that way, too. I know this to be true; it’s my own personal brand of magic. Any unpleasant task–cleaning, maybe, or paying the bills–I find easier to get started on if I overcome my own inertia by visualizing myself at work. Not willing myself to do it. Just seeing it happen. Imagining, with attention to detail, the steps of the task. By mentally running through it a few times, I make it nearly impossible for me not to do it.

It’s kind of like a hypnotic suggestion.

Of course, I can even more efficiently hypnotize myself into pleasurable activities and pre-existing bad habits. Thoughts of, say, a nice hot chocolate and a soak in the tub have something like four times the “oomph” of my virtuous visualization of vacuuming the living room.

Before we can change habits of action, we have to change habits of thought. But then those are even more susceptible to imagination, being only (”only”!) imagination themselves. As bad-habit-reinforcing thoughts surface, acknowledge them, then gently begin once more visualizing yourself performing the replacement habit.

If this sounds a lot like Zen Buddhist exhortations to “acknowledge each thought as it arises and let it go,” there’s a reason for this. John Gardner wrote, in his forward to the 1981 edition, that

“Though TM was unknown, I think, at the time she wrote, [Brande] gives ingenious and subtle exercises in meditation, even speaks of what we would call mantras.”

Meditation, too, is an exercise of the imagination.

Tomorrow is the 19th, so my alarm clock should go off right at 6:00. Tonight, and at various times during the day, I shall pause to visualize myself waking up, fresh and invigorated rather than sleepy and resentful of being conscious. Then reaching for the laptop. Turning it on. And typing away.