I swear I get these odd spurts of mental/creative energy once I've stayed up a few hours past my usual bedtime...

I swear I get these odd spurts of mental/creative energy once I've stayed up a few hours past my usual bedtime. It's like I'm sleep deprived and slightly delirious, but still have a good deal of my faculties about me. Words and ideas are flowing freely through my fingers with more ease than during much of the day. I was pretty much braindead most of the night, yet just had an sudden burst of inspiration over the past hour for one of my writing projects. I was able to conjure up possible plotlines, character traits, dialogue, all out of the blue. All after being stuck for most of this week.

Is this something that happens to other people as well?

How do channel this during the daytime?

It's called "pulling a Kafka"

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Neat chart

It's because in more sleepy state your conscious mind is not interrupting the flow of that part of your mind which is more responsible for inspiration.

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‘The Thought-Fox’ has a special place among Ted Hughes’s early poems. Although it wasn’t the first poem in The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection, published in 1957) he later moved it to first place in his Selected Poems. It is at least partly a poem about writing poetry – one might say about poetic inspiration. In his collection of radio talks, Poetry in the Making, he wrote that he composed it after writing nothing for a year. So we might see the fox as representing the renewal of the poet’s imaginative powers. We should be cautious about accepting everything Hughes writes about his own poetry. In Poetry in the Making he also writes that ‘The Thought-Fox’ was ‘the first “animal” poem I ever wrote’.[1] It wasn’t: he had written and published ‘The Jaguar’ the previous year. But this does show us that he thought the poem was especially important. When he read it in public he used to introduce it by telling the audience about a dream he had had two years before writing it, when studying English at Cambridge. He believed that academic study of literature stifled his creativity, and in the dream a burnt and bloody fox, the size of a man with human hands, entered his room, put a bloody hand on the essay he was writing and said, ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’[2] When he wrote ‘The Thought-Fox’, he may not have been thinking about this dream at all, but it is significant that he later made the connection.

Yeah I dont get anything "creative" during day time. It only happens after 10pm, and I'm usually too tired to get anything done anyways

What's that called?

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Check out the first session of the Coursera class "Learning How to Learn".

It discusses the scientific basis for this phenomenon and how to replicate it consistently.