Finding Your Middle Earth: Daydreaming and the Unconscious
Finding Your Middle Earth: Daydreaming and the Unconscious
He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself: 'Perhaps I shall cross the River myself one day.' To which the other half of his mind always replied: 'Not yet.'"
~ The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 2 ~
I was first introduced to Tolkien’s Middle Earth at the age of 36 with a 9-year-old who fell head over heels with hobbits when he found a hardcover copy of Bilbo’s tale displayed at the entrance to our small library in Ohio. As most early Tolkien readers are prone to ask, whether nine or 36, I too held the question, “Where has this story been all my life?”
Tolkien wasn’t my first introduction to literature or fantasy, but Tolkien’s Middle Earth did bring to me an unrealized awareness that worlds might be built, not only lived in. And this was life-changing for me. I first took solace in worlds built by others –Tolkien, Lewis, Stan Lee, Frank Herbert, George Lucas – looking for nuance and detail on each page, hungry for the reminders that good and evil are universal, challenges and victories will come and go, and it is intimate relationships, friends and family, comradery and partnership, that often reveal God’s hope through it all.
Perhaps more than all those meaningful bits, I wanted to be creativity-adjacent:
I wanted to live in Tolkien’s head and eat the cheeses and apples of Hobbits.
I wanted to drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina and razz a Wookie.
I wanted to harness a sandworm.
Reading Tolkien’s writing gave me permission as a mom of four and graduate student to return to the art of daydreaming, which had been left behind with my childhood. Soon, I discovered the writer and creative within me as well. Other parts of myself I had forgotten or buried in the work of daily living as an adult.
Yet, creativity is something I practice every day. It is all around me. It is in the conversations of parenting children through their own lives, in the sorting and searching of serving in my therapy offices, and the dinner I put on the table each night. The creativity I had held inside me and let carefully into the world, however, felt so stunted that it didn’t really feel creative anymore. It felt sequestered, reigned in, a little imprisoned. There wasn’t space for the largeness of creativity to take over. In living so fully in the “adult world” or trying to fit the adult world in the way I thought I was supposed to fit, I only had left room for brief and small creativity, which hardly leaves room for something to flourish and grow.
“Reading Tolkien’s writing gave me permission as a mom of four and graduate student to return to the art of daydreaming, which had been left behind with my childhood.”
After reading Tolkien, I found myself standing at our patio door looking across fields and woods, imagining creatures within them. I created scenes and scenarios only intended for me, never intended for a page or a profit, probably in the time span of about 20 minutes a few times a week. The coffee in my hand growing cold without my noticing until the tug of a small hand pulled me from my reverie.
What came with this season of day dreaming was Big Magic, as Elizabeth Gilbert calls it. Creativity alighted on me and eventually it was so large, it overflowed into something. I never created worlds like Tolkien – that wasn’t my jam – but it did spur word after word and page after page of Creative Non-Fiction. For a time, I swear I would write articles in my sleep. I’d go to bed with dreamland in mind and wake up fully rested with deep conceptualization and exactly the right introduction mapped across the front of my brain like a whiteboard.
I have lots of thoughts on creativity, many of which I hope you’ll join me in exploring through the article series Unconscious Creativity: Where Spirit and Flesh Meet. Four articles, diving into the lovely companion you hold inside you, often forgotten or a little squelched in all the things adulthood demands. Your unconscious holds Big Magic. Noticing and capturing holds big magic. The unconscious is far less restrained than our conscious selves. Our conscious selves are what we present to the world, put together. They have layers of protection (or at least winter clothing) to ward off the chill of others’ opinions and our own self-judgment. The unconscious self is less refined, yet more alive to tastes, textures, meaning in mystery rather than understanding. Because it is less protective, I also think it tends to more easily hear the whisper of the Holy Spirit. The unconscious is more trusting, to a fault, certainly, and to our benefit – widely connective, unabashedly needy before God, bringing out all the vulnerable bits that make for vibrant art.
The unconscious is the first place we say, “Search me, God, and know my heart,” (Psalm 139:23a) before it ever becomes a structure within our thoughts and reason. It is the place where our relationship with God is less inhibited by the World or our own Flesh, but where God fills in all the blanks so that His love and grace and wisdom can roll out and into our Flesh and the World. Work with our unconscious is called depth work. It is innately spiritual work, the Holy Spirit meeting our most vulnerable selves is Big Magic.
Whether you are intrigued or slightly put-off by the woowoo of this strange world of spirituality and creativity, I am inviting you to explore, I ask you to ponder with me over the next few months:
If God has made us heart, soul, mind, and strength, how does the design of a Master Craftsman work in harmony (even surrounded by and embodying disharmony) to create?
How do we engage in creativity as a professional practice and a spiritual one?
How do we utilize creativity toward goals, but also psychological health and well-being?
How do we practice creativity that supports and inspires, rather than leading to burnout or self-condemnation?
“The unconscious is more trusting, to a fault, certainly, and to our benefit – widely connective, unabashedly needy before God, bringing out all the vulnerable bits that make for vibrant art.”
Putting ourselves out into the world is one challenge of creativity, but first consider the deeper block – the emotions, the harsh inner critic, the internal expectation, the weighty tiredness – that comes from the fact that we are vulnerable creatures, who also have a hard time admitting that we are most vulnerable to our own selves (1).
We spend much of our time as adults avoiding our inner world or whipping it into order. Big Magic never had a chance. We are closed to creativity because we are closed to hearing from ourselves. We can let the light in a little and shake the dust from the creativity vault whether in a creative block or to grow creatively, by first, daydreaming; second, by remembering play; and third, by practicing active imagination.
Daydreaming
Our Sense of self, the work of inner investigation or introspection, getting to know ourselves enough to understand our goals, our hopes, our dreams, our strengths, and our weaknesses, truly, without shame, and the activity of “mind wandering” are all related to similar brain circuitry of the Default Mode Network (2). Use this information at a dinner party. You will look cool. Essentially, participating in daydreaming or allowing the mind to wander not only brings creativity forward (3), but it also brings You forward (4). Daydreaming brings your unique self and the uniqueness you bring to the world up to the surface from the depths so you can see it, sense it, and feel it more clearly, which is all much more stable ground for creation in general. When we feel secure in our sense of who we are, creativity knows where to land, and we can see creative insight, thought, and construct more easily as it passes by us. We notice more and things connect more to construct something, whatever that thing might be. Encountering more of our selves is often a little scary for us, and it’s one reason we avoid daydreaming in favor of distraction, so try to notice the difference. Daydreaming feels expansive but also a little lost; even so, try to fall back into it. It is the hole to Wonderland. (We’ll get to Wonderland itself in a bit.) Take a deep breath and let yourself fall in. Nature is grounding and might be a good place for the eyes to travel or the bottom to sit if one is going to let oneself fall back into the abyss of the unconscious world. Distraction, on the other hand, feels jumpy and chaotic, but promising. There is the rub. Daydreaming takes a little practice for some of us, others of us are experts, but all of us could use the reminder that there is space for that here. Welcome daydreaming when you can. It is doing the work of growing and expanding you. Daydreaming also builds trust that we can be with our unconscious without tearing it to shreds with judgment. Start by honoring daydreaming with help, accessing the resource of active imagination we explore later in this article.
Remembering Play
We will save this one for our next article in this series on Unconscious Creativity. But know that it is often a helpful step in the road to creativity expansion, mostly because of all that jargon I spoke about in the beginning regarding my relationship to Tolkien and daydreaming – we were children once, and creativity came easily because the world needed much less from us. Play gives us a space to be less, do less, and rest in the Creator’s boundless Creativity. We’ll come back to it. It’s that good.
Active Imagination
Psychologist Carl Jung introduced the world to the construct of active imagination, which is not daydreaming, but maybe daydreaming on steroids. It is looking out your back patio and welcoming the narratives within you to come forward, inviting them over for dinner even though they may look like Tolkien or your crazy Uncle Charlie. Active imagination is the Wonderland at the end of Alice’s hole of daydreaming. Active imagination is setting the intention to get to know your dream world and all the beautiful and ugly bits that come with it.
In active imagination, you sit with a notebook and say, “Hi, Me. Here we are together. Would you like some tea? Tell me what bothers you, what hurts you, what inspires you, what feels good to you.”
Jung presents active imagination as a journey within, just as you would take a journey without. You will visit different places and meet different people. You should come out of active imagination with a literal cast of characters in the Life of Heidi in the Land of Heidi (for Heidi, insert your own name, otherwise you are in for a wild ride I cannot promise you want to be a part of). You will feel a little like the movie Inside Out. You might find your own Bing Bong or wander into the Memory Dumb Abyss. You can set a timer if you are afraid of getting lost because there is no destination, and that is what makes Active Imagination a little disconcerting and a whole lot special. The destination is depth, and you are God’s wondrous creation. You are limited, but You are endless.
Happy daydreaming. Or in the words of Gandalf: "Home is now behind you. The world is ahead." – The Hobbit
Stay tuned for the next in this four-part series on creativity -
Transitions & Turmoil: Life Change & Creativity
1. Peterschmidt, D., & Davis, K. (2023, November 1). The science of boredom and daydreaming. Science Friday. https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-science-of-boredom-and-daydreaming/
2. Azarias, F. R., Almeida, G. H., de Melo, L. F., Rici, R. E., & Maria, D. A. (2025). The journey of the default mode network: Development, function, and impact on Mental Health. Biology, 14(4), 395. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology14040395
3. Sun, J., He, L., Chen, Q., Yang, W., Wei, D., & Qiu, J. (2021). The bright side and dark side of daydreaming predict creativity together through brain functional connectivity. Human Brain Mapping, 43(3), 902–914. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25693
4. Cozolino, L. J. (2014a). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the developing Social Brain. W.W. Norton & Company.