Muses: When Inspiration Feels Like Contact
I was trying to remember what I wanted to research next. Eventually the word returned: Muses.
The idea that inspiration comes from somewhere outside us. That a melody, a character, or an image reaches a person who is able to receive it. That the artist might have an address without being the place of manufacture.
This interests me because I recognize something of the experience. When an off-the-wall creative idea pops into my head, I often feel absolutely no conscious effort behind it. I have not watched myself assemble the parts. The idea is suddenly available.
Sometimes it has an unmistakably me-ish quality. I recognize my tastes, my preoccupations, the sorts of things I would be likely to put together. At other times it feels foreign, and I am baffled that it has appeared in my own mind. If I had to estimate, I would say the two experiences occur about equally often. That is an impression, not a measurement.
Unfortunately, I cannot now retrieve a particular example of the foreign kind. I can remember how it felt without recovering what it was. This is an awkward beginning for an investigation, but it is the honest one. A missing example cannot become a beautifully reconstructed scene just because the scene would help the essay.
What I have is a question. I would like to understand why inspiration sometimes feels like contact.
I also have a suspicion about the future: as science probes deeper into reality, it may encounter things that would look paranormal to us now. I cannot substantiate that prediction. I want to see how far curiosity can take it before curiosity starts impersonating evidence.
Paul McCartney seemed a reasonable person to ask first.
The melody that was already there
In a 2001 interview with Terry Gross, McCartney described waking with the melody of “Yesterday” in his head. He went to a piano, worked out chords, and used temporary words while the real lyrics remained unwritten. The account is straightforward: the tune arrived during sleep; the conscious work followed. 1
The distinction matters. The origin story concerns a melody, not a finished record descending intact into a bedroom. Receiving something still left him something to do.
A later interview brings us closer to the question of a supplier. Speaking to Brian Hiatt for Rolling Stone in 2012, McCartney entertained an otherworldly explanation, but also proposed that a mind continually absorbs information and sometimes produces an unexpected result. Then he added:
“On the other hand, it might be God, I’m not ruling that out.” 2
He holds two possibilities open. One is a process within himself that he did not experience conducting. The other reaches beyond him.
That uncertainty makes the account more interesting to me. There is no need to turn McCartney into a prophet of cosmic songwriting. He has encountered something in his own working life whose origin he cannot confidently describe.
There are two questions here, and they are easy to confuse. Did McCartney consciously compose the melody? By his account, he did not experience doing so. Did something outside his mind supply it? His account does not establish that.
Between those questions lies much of this subject.
When I deliberately write a sentence, I have some sense of the decisions. I can watch myself reject a word, move a clause, soften a claim. An idea that arrives suddenly gives me no comparable view of its construction. The result is present; the process is absent from experience. The question is whether that missing process happened elsewhere in the mind, or elsewhere altogether.
The dream supplies an especially good setting for the question because the waking person returns to find something waiting. But a dream is already an event in a person’s mental life. It would take additional evidence to turn its unfamiliar contents into a visitor.
For that, we need people who make a stronger claim.
Before the artist owned the song
At the opening of Hesiod’s Theogony, the Muses encounter the poet while he is tending sheep. They teach him song and breathe a divine voice into him. In the poem’s account, his ability has identifiable givers. They also warn that they can speak falsehoods resembling truth. The source of inspiration is powerful without being a simple guarantee of accuracy. 3
I find that warning almost as arresting as the encounter. A world with Muses would still contain a problem of trust.
This is a religious poem, not a recorded interview. Its first-person encounter cannot simply be entered in a modern case file as an independently corroborated event. What it establishes is the presence of a literary conception: a poet speaks because beings beyond him have enabled the speaking.
Plato gives that conception an argument in Ion. His Socrates compares divine inspiration to a magnet transmitting its power through a chain of rings. The poet, performer, and audience participate in the transmission. The discussion also challenges the idea that a performer’s eloquence necessarily comes from systematic knowledge or expertise. 4
The image changes the location of creativity. We commonly put a talented person at the beginning of the chain. In this account, the person is already one of the rings.
It is tempting to say that the ancient world believed in external inspiration and the modern world replaced it with individual genius. That is too smooth a story for the material we have. The accounts collected here do not establish a complete history of what whole civilizations believed. They show that the conception existed, and that versions of it remain available to people who make things.
A poet can invoke a Muse because the invocation is traditional, because it expresses dependence, because it dramatizes an experience, or because the poet believes someone is listening. Those possibilities need not always be separable. The same words can function differently in different lives.
What interests me is the moment when a conventional invocation becomes a description of something the writer thinks actually happened.
Dictation, dreams, and the unseen collaborator
William Blake wrote to Thomas Butts that a long poem had come through dictation, in passages arriving without preparation and sometimes against his will. His description sharply reduces the distance between inspiration and transcription. He represents himself as receiving language, not merely receiving a promising subject. 5
The passage is firsthand testimony, preserved in a later biography. It does not, by itself, identify who or what dictated the words. That limitation deserves to remain visible. The fact that someone uses the language of dictation does not let me fill the other end of the conversation with whichever entity I find most compelling.
Still, the claim has force. To receive an image is one thing. To feel that words are arriving in sequence is another. Language seems to come with decisions already made.
Robert Louis Stevenson offers a more playful description of unseen assistance. In “A Chapter on Dreams,” he calls his dream workers Brownies or Little People. He credits them with fictional material, including scenes used in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, while distinguishing their contributions from his waking work. He even imagines an unseen collaborator doing the storytelling while the public credit goes to the man with the bank account. 6
Stevenson’s humor is part of the evidence. It would be a mistake to remove it and announce that he confessed to literal fairy authorship. But the humor also expresses an uncomfortable division of labor: one part of the person receives praise for work another part seems to have performed independently.
Coleridge’s published preface to “Kubla Khan” describes a related experience. During sleep, images and corresponding expressions supposedly arose without felt effort. After waking, he began writing them down; an interruption then cost him much of what he believed he had received. This is the poet’s retrospective account, not an independently verified record of the dream. 7
The three accounts differ. Blake speaks of dictation. Stevenson gives his dream creativity a mischievous workforce. Coleridge describes effortless language that becomes difficult to recover. None should be used as a substitute for the others.
Together they raise a question about the conscious author. If parts of me can work without consulting the part that says “I,” then the individual I usually identify with may be a smaller participant in creativity than I suppose.
That possibility can itself feel strange. Something need not come from outside the organism to come from beyond the familiar self. Before we cross the boundary of the brain, we should notice the boundaries already present within our experience.
A poem coming toward you
One of the most vivid accounts reaches us through another writer.
In her 2009 TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts a conversation with the poet Ruth Stone. Stone reportedly described poems approaching her across the landscape while she worked outdoors. She would hurry for paper before a poem passed through her. If she missed it, it might continue to another poet. Gilbert also relates Stone’s extraordinary description of catching a departing poem and recording it backward. 8
In the same talk, Gilbert recounts Tom Waits addressing an inconveniently arriving melody while driving. Unable to record it, he asked the inspiration to return at a better time or visit another songwriter. 8
These are Gilbert’s reports of conversations. They are not direct recordings of Stone and Waits making these statements. The transmission between witness and reader is itself part of the story.
Stone’s account especially interests me because the poem has somewhere else to go. Inspiration possesses a trajectory independent of the person who might record it. The writer is a possible destination.
That is a much stronger imaginative proposition than the ordinary observation that an idea can be forgotten. Forgetting means the person loses access. A traveling poem suggests that the idea continues without them.
Waits’s reported response can be read as a practical way of handling that feeling. Giving the song an independent existence permits a negotiation. A creator need not personally carry the responsibility for every idea that appears at an inconvenient moment.
But usefulness cannot decide whether the negotiation has a literal partner. People can address an uncooperative computer without believing it has intentions. Equally, someone can use humor while expressing a serious belief. Tone complicates interpretation; it does not settle it.
I want the accounts to retain that complication. If we remove everything that resists literal interpretation, we manufacture evidence. If we declare every strange description a metaphor before examining it, we have made another kind of premature decision.
Ideas looking for a person
Gilbert’s own account is more explicit. In an On Being interview, she describes ideas as living, conscious entities seeking human collaborators. She also recounts abandoning a novel set in the Amazon and discovering that Ann Patchett was developing a strikingly similar project, which became State of Wonder. Gilbert interprets the coincidence through the possibility that the idea moved between them when they met. She also calls their interpretation magical thinking. 9
There is a crucial difference between the reported overlap and the proposed transfer. Similar projects are something we can compare. A migrating idea is an explanation of the similarity. The explanation requires evidence of its own.
Even so, this gives the external-source hypothesis a distinct shape. The source need not be a god transmitting instructions. An idea might itself be the thing that exists beyond the creator.
The poet Jack Spicer developed a conception of poetic dictation whose vocabulary includes radios and Martians. His collected lectures make reception a sustained concern rather than an incidental remark. The unusual vocabulary should be read within his poetics before being treated as a literal claim about extraterrestrials. 10
Rick Rubin uses the antenna image directly. In conversation with Andrew Huberman, he rejects the suggestion that his creative source exists only within us. He describes it as an organizing principle extending through reality, with art and discoveries among its outgrowths:
“Our part of it is the antenna that connects to it.” 11
An antenna receives, but it also selects. It has a range, an orientation, a sensitivity. It does not catch everything that exists.
As an analogy, that accommodates something I recognize in my own experience: even an arriving idea may have my tastes in it. If there were an outside source, reception could still depend on the receiver. A melody arriving to a musician might take a form that person could hear and develop. An image arriving to a novelist might become language only through that novelist’s habits.
This is a possibility suggested by the analogy, not a finding about how minds work. Its weakness is also clear. An explanation that accommodates every outcome can become difficult to test. Familiar ideas come from a source adapted to me; unfamiliar ideas come from a source beyond me. If both count as confirmation, what could count against it?
A beautiful metaphor earns us a question. It does not automatically earn us a mechanism.
The spirits and the manuscript
W. B. Yeats provides a case in which the proposed communicators helped supply a system of thought. A Vision developed through automatic writing undertaken by his wife, George Yeats. In his later account, the communicators offered metaphors for poetry. He also described elements of the resulting system in symbolic terms, complicating any simple statement of his literal belief. 12
There is a useful warning in the scholarship: the famous sentence about supplying metaphors has no verbatim equivalent in the surviving automatic script. The polished account and the underlying records are not identical documents. 13
That distinction deserves more attention than it usually gets. We want to know what was written at the time, what was remembered later, and what was revised for publication. Each can be valuable. They answer different questions.
An origin story is itself a creative work. Its author chooses a beginning, removes complications, and gives the experience a shape someone else can follow. That does not make the story false. It makes the records important.
If an artist remembers that a poem arrived complete, a surviving draft might show extensive changes. Those changes would weaken one meaning of “complete,” but perhaps leave another intact. The initial idea might have felt whole before its execution was adequate. A person may recognize what a piece should become long before being able to produce it.
We should ask exactly what arrived: a phrase, a structure, a feeling of direction, or all the words? Was the sense of completion present at the time or added by hindsight? Did the creator treat revisions as improvements to the received material, or corrections to their own reception?
These questions make the possible encounter more specific. A visitor who supplies an image is making a different contribution from a visitor who dictates a book.
The songwriter who refuses the delivery
Chris Martin has described successful songs as coming through him, while also describing experimentation at the piano and the other band members’ contributions. Nick Cave reports a stronger private statement: Martin told him he could ask the cosmos for a song and receive one from God. The direct account and Cave’s report should remain distinct. 1415
Cave’s own position is less easily summarized. In The Red Hand Files, issue 297, he rejects divine song delivery as a description of his experience. He emphasizes effort, inward examination, and the work of giving form to difficult material. 15
In the later issue 356, however, he describes an intelligent creative energy both within and beyond us, and a creative outpouring connected with grief. He explicitly grounds the account in intuition. 16
It is possible to read these statements as a distinction between a larger creative participation and the delivery of finished songs. That is my interpretation; it should not be substituted for Cave’s own explanation of how the statements fit together.
Their tension helps me resist an attractive mistake. Effortlessness does not have to be the defining feature of an outside source. A collaboration can be exhausting. Something received can be incomplete, difficult, or demanding.
Conversely, effortlessness does not require a collaborator. A process can be automatic and wholly internal.
There is no simple equation between labor and origin. If I spend a month developing an idea, that does not prove I invented its beginning consciously. If its beginning takes a second, that does not prove someone gave it to me.
The possible Muse would have to survive both the flash and the workbench.
What does “outside” mean?
By this point, the word has accumulated too many jobs.
Outside conscious awareness is the most modest meaning. A mental process produces a result without appearing in the person’s experience as deliberate work. This requires no being beyond the individual.
Outside the familiar self concerns recognition. The idea feels unlike my usual thoughts or tastes. That is a report about how I encounter it, not yet a claim about its location.
Outside the individual could refer to other people, language, culture, or the environment. In that ordinary sense, inspiration plainly has material beyond us. A sentence in a book can give me something I could not have supplied from my own experience alone.
Outside the brain is a different proposition: some part of the creative event depends on an information source or intelligence that is not contained in the person’s nervous system or conveyed through ordinary sensory channels.
Independent of any particular creator is different again. Perhaps a melody exists as a possibility before anyone makes it audible. That would not necessarily mean it is alive, wants anything, or can transmit itself.
These meanings can overlap in someone’s account. They should not be allowed to change places unnoticed in an argument.
If a person discovers a mathematical relationship, we can ask whether the relationship was already true. If a composer discovers a melody, we can ask whether that sequence was already possible. Neither question by itself establishes a channel through which the discovery traveled.
Existing as a possibility is not the same as existing as an agent.
Yet the distinction leaves a question alive: what kind of reality do possibilities have? A world could be richer than the things already realized within it without containing a single supernatural messenger. Even this less personal form of “outside” would change how we picture creativity.
I can imagine an essay that answers all these questions by selecting the interpretation most congenial to its author. I would rather find out which distinctions my preferred interpretation can survive.
The hidden workshop has evidence
The internal explanation deserves more than a passing mention. It has experimental support.
A 2012 study by Benjamin Baird and colleagues used tasks asking participants to suggest unusual uses for objects. During an interval, an undemanding activity associated with more mind wandering improved performance on previously encountered problems compared with several other conditions. The study supports a role for incubation without sustained conscious attention to the problem. It does not show that all spontaneous creativity operates identically, or that mind wandering guarantees good ideas. 17
In 2004, Mark Jung-Beeman and colleagues used brain imaging and electrical recordings while people solved verbal problems. They found neural differences associated with self-reported insight, including a burst of high-frequency activity shortly before the solution response. These were controlled word problems, not recordings of a composer dreaming an entire melody. 18
Together, these studies give us reasons to take unobserved internal processing seriously. The lack of conscious effort is compatible with work being done by the brain. My surprise cannot cancel that evidence.
It is equally important to keep the scale of the claim accurate. Findings about particular tasks help explain features of insight. They do not constitute a completed theory of every poem, dream, or apparent encounter in this essay.
There is a familiar temptation on each side. One person sees neural activity and declares the metaphysical questions finished. Another sees remaining questions and declares the brain a receiver. Neither conclusion follows simply from those observations.
A receiver would need a physical operation, so observing brain activity alone would not logically exclude every imaginable reception theory. But that is a very limited point. Merely being compatible with an observation does not mean a theory has earned support from it. A receiver hypothesis would need positive evidence that the internal account does not already explain.
If I want the possibility to be taken seriously, I owe the question that difficulty.
There is also something strange about the internal explanation that deserves to be felt. A mind capable of surprising its own conscious participant is already an extraordinary thing. Learning that an experience originates within us would not make the experience trivial. It would reveal that “within us” contains more than the self we habitually consult.
The future I suspect
My suspicion about future science is partly a suspicion about our vocabulary. “Paranormal” is a category made relative to what we presently regard as normal. A phenomenon that became reliably measurable and explainable would acquire a different place in our understanding.
That does not mean existing paranormal claims are destined for vindication. Some may concern mistakes, some may lack enough evidence to assess, and some may turn out to describe experiences accurately while explaining them incorrectly. The possibility that knowledge will change cannot tell us in advance which claims will survive.
Nor does the existence of something difficult to explain make every proposed explanation equally plausible. A mystery has constraints. The source accounts, the brain studies, the history of a person’s work, and the availability of ordinary information all impose them.
When I say reality may eventually resemble things we now call paranormal, I mean I would not be astonished if a future account of mind and world disturbed some of our present categories. I am expressing an expectation, not reporting a discovery.
What I hope to preserve is the willingness to investigate an unsettling possibility without requiring its strangeness to count as a defect. What I need to preserve alongside it is the possibility of finding out that I was wrong.
Otherwise I have built a belief whose only destination is itself.
The outside source that interests me need not violate nature. If it exists and participates in events, it would be part of the reality we need to understand. Calling it natural would not make it less startling. The startling part would be discovering that a thought I considered private involved something I had not known was there.
But we have not made that discovery here. We have documented people who describe reception, people who believe in suppliers, and reasons to distinguish the two.
What would make the question answerable?
The accounts are a beginning. To investigate beyond them, we need to ask what different explanations predict.
One possible direction would concern information. Suppose a person repeatedly received specific, verifiable information they could not plausibly have acquired, under conditions that prevented ordinary access and leakage. That would be more consequential than the feeling of foreignness. It would still require careful replication and investigation of alternative routes.
A musical idea is harder. A novel melody does not come with an external answer key. We cannot usually ask a hypothetical source to verify that it transmitted the sequence. The absence of conscious preparation is also difficult to establish: the person may have encountered relevant material long before without remembering it.
Another direction would be unusually detailed independent convergence. If separate creators documented the same highly specific structure before contact, the records would be worth examining. But shared influences, common problems, cultural conditions, and chance would have to be considered. Independent similarity alone would not identify a cosmic sender.
A reception theory could also propose conditions under which reception should increase or decrease. Useful predictions would distinguish it from changes in attention, mood, memory, and expectation. If the theory has no observation that could weigh against it, it remains an interpretation rather than an effective experimental proposal.
These are examples of what a test might need, not reports that such evidence has been obtained.
For my own experience, the first useful step is much smaller. Record the next surprising idea immediately. Write what it was, what preceded it, whether it felt familiar or foreign, and what I changed afterward. Preserve the initial version beside the finished one.
That would not detect a Muse. It would give me a better account of an event I am otherwise likely to remember chiefly through its feeling.
The missing example at the beginning of this essay is a reminder of what curiosity loses when it has no records.
Why I still want the possibility
There is something appealing about a world in which creation is also relationship. It would mean that a person making something might be answering, not just originating.
I should acknowledge that appeal because it can influence what I notice. A testimony of reception may linger in my mind longer than a testimony of steady construction. An account from a famous artist may seem more authoritative because I admire the result. Neither preference can settle where the work came from.
The practical consequences also cut both ways. Treating inspiration as a visitor could encourage attention and gratitude. It could relieve the pressure to consciously manufacture every beginning. It could also encourage waiting, excuse weak work, or make an ordinary idea seem too sacred to revise.
A source, if there were one, would not remove judgment. Hesiod’s Muses already complicate the promise of truth. A powerful feeling of arrival tells me that something happened in my experience. It cannot guarantee that what arrived is accurate, valuable, or good.
The creator still has to decide what deserves to exist beyond that first encounter.
I do not want to make the world smaller just to finish an explanation. I also do not want to make a claim larger than its evidence because the larger claim is the one I would enjoy believing.
The historical accounts help because they preserve a recurring difficulty in different forms. McCartney wonders about the origin of a tune. Blake reports dictation. Stevenson divides the work between himself and his dream collaborators. Gilbert gives ideas lives of their own. Rubin imagines an antenna. Cave makes room for both participation and labor.
Their statements do not combine into a vote that proves an external source. They give the question a history, a vocabulary, and particulars to examine.
I began with a word I had been trying to remember. Now I have several meanings of “outside,” some accounts I can trace, and a clearer sense of what would be needed to move from possibility to knowledge.
The next time an idea appears without warning, I want to catch it before I decide where it came from.
First, write it down.
Leave room beside it for the question.
Source ledger
The links below distinguish original testimony from later reporting. Quotations are brief; the essay’s interpretations and proposed tests are its own. An account being well documented means that someone made the statement, not that the statement’s explanation has been independently established.
1. Paul McCartney interviewed by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 2001. Direct interview transcript: dream melody and subsequent work.
2. Brian Hiatt, “Paul’s Fresh Start,” Rolling Stone, 2012, reproduced by the Paul McCartney Project. Interview testimony accessed through a reproduction; McCartney entertains both internal processing and divine origin.
3. Hesiod, Theogony, especially lines 22–34, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White. Primary literary text; the Muse encounter is not treated as independently verified autobiography.
4. Plato, Ion, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Primary philosophical dialogue; the magnetic chain occurs in an argument about inspiration and expertise.
5. Blake’s letter to Thomas Butts, reproduced in Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake. First-person letter available through a later printed source.
6. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams”. Primary essay, originally published in 1888; personification and humor are retained as interpretive complications.
7. Coleridge, preface to “Kubla Khan,” published 1816. Primary literary account reproduced on a university site; retrospective testimony rather than verification of the dream.
8. Elizabeth Gilbert, “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” TED, 2009; accessible transcript. Gilbert’s testimony about conversations with Stone and Waits; secondhand for their experiences.
9. Gilbert interviewed by Krista Tippett, On Being: “Choosing Curiosity Over Fear”. Direct interview: autonomous ideas and her interpretation of the Patchett coincidence.
10. Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures, edited by Peter Gizzi. Scholarly edition and publisher description establish the dictation/radio vocabulary; no literal alien encounter is inferred.
11. Rick Rubin interviewed by Andrew Huberman, 2023. Direct transcript: source beyond the individual and antenna analogy.
12. “W. B. Yeats and A Vision: An Introduction”. Scholarly contextual discussion with passages from Yeats; automatic writing and the symbolic status of the system.
13. “‘Metaphors for Poetry’: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers,” in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision. Scholarly qualification about the absence of a verbatim equivalent in the automatic script.
14. Howard Stern Show account of Chris Martin’s songwriting interview. Program’s report with direct quotations; distinguishes arriving material from development and arrangement.
15. Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, issue 297: “Are Songs from God?”. Primary statement by Cave; secondhand report of Martin’s cosmic explanation.
16. Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, issue 356. Primary statement; Cave explicitly identifies the wider consciousness account as intuitive.
17. Baird et al., “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” Psychological Science 23 (2012), 1117–1122. Primary experimental research; author-hosted full paper.
18. Jung-Beeman et al., “Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight,” PLOS Biology 2 (2004), e97. Primary experimental research; task-specific neural findings, not a general settlement of creative origins.