4. Sleep on it.

If you have been wrestling with a problem all day without making any apparent progress, try dismissing it from your mind, and put o f f making a decision until you've had a chance to "sleep on it." Remember that your creative mechanism works best when there is not too much interference from your conscious "I." In sleep, the creative mechanism has an ideal opportunity to work in­dependently of conscious interference, if you have pre­viously started the wheels turning.

Remember the fairy story about the Shoemaker and the Elves? The shoemaker found that if he cut out the leather, and laid out the patterns before retiring, little elves came and actually put the shoes together for him while he was sleeping.

. Many creative workers have used a very similar tech­nique. Mrs. Thomas A. Edison has said that each eve­ning her husband would go over in his mind those things which he hoped to accomplish the next day. Sometimes, he would make a list of the jobs he wanted to do, and problems which he hoped to solve.

Sir Walter Scott is reported to have said to himself, whenever his ideas would not jell, "Never mind, I shall have it at seven o'clock tomorrow morning."

V. Bechterev said, "It happened several times when I concentrated in the evening on a subject which I had put into poetic shape, that in the morning, I had only to take my pen and the words flowed, as it were, spontaneously, I had only to polish them later."

Edison's well-known "cat-naps" were far more than mere respites from fatigue. Joseph Rossman, in the Psy­chology of Invention, says, "When stumped by something, he would stretch out in his Menlo workshop and, half-dozing, get an idea from his dream mind to help him around the difficulty."

J. B. Priestley dreamed three essays, complete in every detail—"The Berkshire Beast," "The Strange Outfitter," and "The Dream."

Archbishop Temple of Canterbury has said: "All de­cisive thinking goes on behind the scenes; I seldom know when it takes place . . . much of it certainly during sleep." Henry Ward Beecher once preached every day for 18 months. His method? He kept a number of ideas "hatching" and each night before retiring would select an "incubating idea" and "stir it up" by thinking intensely about it. The next morning it would have fitted itself to­gether for a sermon.

Kekule's discovery of the secret of the benzine mole­cule during sleep, Otto Loewi's Nobel Prize-winning dis­covery (that active chemicals are involved in the action of nerves), and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Brownies," which he said gave him all his plot ideas while sleeping, are all well known. Less well known is the fact that m a n y businessmen use the same technique. For example, Henry Cobbs, who started his business in the early 1930's with a ten-dollar bill and now operates a multi-million-dollar mail order fruit business in North Miami, Florida, keeps a notebook by his bedside to jot down creative ideas i m -mediately upon wakening.

Vic Pocker arrived in this country f r o m Hungary w i t h no money and unable to speak English. He got a job as a welder, went to night school to learn English, and saved his money. His savings were wiped out in the depression, put in 1932 he started a small welding shop of his own, which he called Steel Fabricators. Today that small busi­ness has grown into a profitable million-dollar firm. "I've discovered you have to make your own breaks," he says. "Sometimes in my dreams I get ideas for licking problems, and wake up all excited. Many's the time I've gotten out of bed at 2 A.M. and gone down to the shop to see if an idea would work."