Creative Thinking With Fake I.D.

How wearing a "mask" and adopting a fake I.D. can unleash a torrent of creative brilliance!

Creativity eluding you? To trigger a torrent of creative brilliance you might need to get away from YOU and try adopting a fake ID! Do as writers do and adopt a nom-de-plume, a pen name, and you'll give yourself a whole different personality to think with! Hollywood is full of glamourous stars who wouldn't seem quite as cool and 'together' sporting their real birth names. Can you imagine cheering on a Maurice Micklewhite (better known as Michael Caine)? Can you imagine Marion Morrison as a tough cowboy? No? Well, that's why he changed his name to John Wayne! How about a gay rock star with the name Reginald Kenneth Dwight? Not very hip is it? So let's change that to the more flambuoyant Elton John.

Taking on a new persona could be just the thing that gives you the freedom to be creatively expressive. Let's say that you've got a good, honest, down to earth name like John or Jane Smith. And you live a fairly regular law-abiding life and you're getting by. When it comes to creative thinking, you have your moments but you figure you're "just not the creative type". Now, how would you feel if you adopted the name and persona of a Joaquim Devilere, Huckleberry Saunders, Ludo van Sizzle, or Genevieve Montblanc? Even as you contemplate those names, can you feel your mind reach out to assess what those characters might be like? Can you hear what voice each of those characters might speak in? Can you imagine how they would walk and express themselves, what physical characteristics they might use?

Remember the last fancy dress party you went to? With a mask on or full fancy dress costume, weren't you freer to express yourself in silly, fun or outrageous ways? After all, it wasn't YOU doing it... it was the character you were playing. Using a fake ID, you free your mind to think in new, different ways. That's what keeps all those online chatrooms going -- shy people (and quite a few weirdos!) adopting online characters so that they can have the experience of communicating with other people in ways that they would not normally feel comfortable doing.

In the book Cosmic Memory by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, the authors talk about the "artificial reincarnation" work of Dr. Vladimir Raikov, a Russian researcher, who hypnotised art students to believe that they were Great Masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael or Rembrandt. The results were astonishing in that the students started to create very credible art work during the course -- even if they had never painted so much as a smiley face. He was able to replicate these results in other fields such as healing, where students were given the name and personalities of great healers.

Creativity teachers will often give students the exercise of "thinking with someone else's head". This is a vivid imagination exercise where one visualises meeting a Genius such as Da Vinci, Einstein or Mozart. And one steps behind them, unzips their back and then steps inside the genius, becoming the genius. It's a wonderful symbol to feed the subconscious mind and lets it know that it is time to 'ramp-up' its creative output.

So use Fake IDs in your creative thinking, in your writing and for specific creative projects in different fields of creative endeavour. It will shake you up, shake you lose and give you a freedom to be a multi-faceted dazzling creative thinker!