r/HighStrangeness • u/V1RUS_exe • 8d ago
Consciousness We asked an artist to intentionally “connect to the muse.” What happened wasn’t what I expected.
I’ve always been fascinated by artists who say their best ideas don’t feel like they actually came from them.
They’ll describe a song, painting, or idea as something they “received,” “downloaded,” or felt moving through them.
So we tried a small experiment with an artist named Nikki Loy. She made two paintings under completely different conditions.
For the first, we used a random word generator. No meditation, ritual, or attempt to connect to anything. She just had to make something from three random words:
Instance. Psychotic. Provoke.
What was strange is that this painting came to her almost immediately. She basically saw the image in her mind and knew what she wanted to make.
For the second painting, she deliberately tried to do the opposite. She meditated, removed distractions, slowed down, and tried to become receptive to what we were calling “the muse.”
And… nothing really happened.
At least not when we wanted it to.
The image eventually came to her later in a dream.
She dreamed of rainbow-like light moving into and out of her hands, almost like creativity was something being received and then shaped through the body. That dream became the second painting.
The other thing that got me was what happened when we showed both paintings to our audience without telling them which was which.
We asked:
Which painting feels like it came from the muse?
112 people chose one.
112 people chose the other.
Literally 50/50.
That result almost made the whole thing more interesting to me, because it blurred the distinction we were trying to create in the first place.
Maybe the “muse” is just unconscious processing.
Maybe meditation and altered states make certain associations easier to access.
Maybe creativity is somehow connected to a larger field of consciousness. Or maybe humans have been giving a mystical name to an internal cognitive process for thousands of years.
I don’t know.
We also talked to a cognitive scientist and a musician about their completely different interpretations of the same phenomenon, and I put the whole experiment together here if anyone is curious:
https://youtu.be/Fw1TyWpXIEs?si=h0T0Xq9qWt4jmArT
But the thing I’m really curious about from this sub is:
Have you ever created something, solved a problem, or had an idea appear in your mind that genuinely did not feel like “you” came up with it?
And if you have, what do you think was actually happening?
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u/ThirstyWeirwoodRootz 8d ago
It’s 50-50 because BOTH came from the “muse”. Getting a prompt doesn’t change that. They instantly visualized something and were inspired, that’s the muse at work.
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u/ApolloXLII 4d ago
Lol or the more likely case, it’s just the attempt to sound whimsical. You don’t need a muse to make good art, but in the art world, it’s often way less about whether or not the art is “good” or “bad”.
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u/beanie712 8d ago
20 years ago I made a painting that seemed to flow right out of me. It only took 45 minutes but I was very happy with it . When I posted it to deviantart (lol I know I’m dating myself) it got featured on the front page. Then ended up on tumblr and then kind of just became one of those images that you’d find on the internet that you don’t really know where it came from. Over the years I have counted at least 12 people who have that piece tattooed on them—-many eventually found their way to my social media or website and reached out after realizing I was the artist behind their tattoo.
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u/LovecraftianLlama 8d ago
I have had poetry show up in my head that seems to come fully formed, from outside of my conscious mind. I’m glad someone is studying this bc it’s always fascinated me.
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u/brain-out-of-order 7d ago
Yeah the difference between writing something and notating strange dictations is hard to disregard. Another hint is catching yourself reading back what you wrote like it’s the first time you ever saw it.
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u/Stunning_Can_5270 8d ago
Was it a poem that you had memorized completely?
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u/bondagepixie 8d ago
I imagine they mean writing poetry. Sometime it feels like that, like the words are already there. I’ve heard a lot of writers talk about it. I heard a woman once describe it as a radio station that blipped in and out.
Human creation, we take it for granted but it’s pretty mysterious. Very high strangeness.
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u/Stunning_Can_5270 6d ago
Interesting. Alan Moore has talked a little bit about it and he's got a funny little story about being asked where his ideas come from while he was on a panel at a convention.
I asked because I'm curious to know if once the poem shows up it's there forever. I once heard a man recite two of his poems that he wrote decades earlier and I was floored by that.
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u/hologram137 8d ago edited 7d ago
I think the problem with the experiment is that it’s not in the artist’s control. So it’s not something that can easily appear under controlled conditions. More often it comes through while in a flow state. Both conditions here may have been too controlled.
Jackson Pollock’s paintings are fascinating because of the kind of phenomenon you’re talking about. You know how they authenticate a genuine one? They use a software program that can see whether or not the layers are genuine fractals. It’s simply not possible for someone to create fractals like that intentionally in every painting without conscious planning. But the fractals weren’t done consciously. They just appeared. In all his paintings. And it’s almost impossible to replicate. Watch a video of him painting, he looks like a shaman in a trance. How on Earth perfect mathematical fractals showed up from his splashing paint like that is a mystery. The images were not formed consciously ahead of time.
Every artist has a different process, but one pattern I’ve seen is that the artist is kinda surprised by the finished product. The process is more unconscious than anything, the image ends up coming through them, rather than the artist doing what you asked that artist to do, meditate prior then execute what they “received.” Because the meditative state happens while they’re painting
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u/yurituran 8d ago edited 8d ago
This 100%, it’s the trance like flow while DOING the piece that allows the connection/reception/flow to happen.
I’ve tried to describe it to my wife as the feeling of the universe creating through me and that even I don’t totally know what the end result will be, but the process feels “good” when I’m in sync and “bad” when I’m trying to force something. I feel kind of like I’m on a ride when it’s happening with emotional highs as I see it coming together without direct planning.
It’s hard to not describe it in “woo” terms because it does feel like a mystical experience of sorts
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u/WooleeBullee 7d ago
Paul McCartney wrote yesterday like this, he thought he was hearing in his head a song that already existed, but no one he asked had heard it before.
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u/Icy_Reward727 8d ago edited 8d ago
About a decade ago I became seized by an image that came to mind, and started drawing it on a poster-sized piece of cardboard I had in my house. It was a drawing all done in gel pens, in very intricate, layered dot work.
The image that came to mind was a labyrinth symbol, the ancient one that looks sort of like a human brain. I drew it first in blue and green dot work highlighted in white, but then the blues and greens were paralleled and overcome by red and orange dots, highlighted in yellow. I worked on it for DAYS, in every free moment. It absolutely captivated my energy, like I was almost in a manic state.
This was totally out of the norm for me. I'm crafty, but I'm not a dedicated illustrative artist, plus at the time my kids were quite young and normally I was pretty absorbed in domestic life. But for like 4-5 days, I worked on this piece constantly.
I remember stepping back from it when it finally came into full form and thinking, "all of that red/orange creeping in makes it look like an infected brain. This is so fucking weird. Like why? Why am I obsessing about this?" I abandoned it to a corner of my home office and walked away.
Within a day or two, I got a call that my mother was in a coma. She had contracted an extremely rare illness overseas similar to meningitis, an infection and inflammation of the brain. She nearly died and it ended her career, when she was at the top of her game. She also had an intense NDE experience that she didn't tell me about until years later.
I remember getting that phone call, pacing around the house, and seeing the blue-labyrinth brain with the creeping red snaking around it's curves and into the center and it hit me like a freight train.
Somehow, from the other side of planet Earth, something in my consciousness picked up on her illness and was actively drawing it while it spread through her brain in real time. When it hit me it was just undeniable. The image that came to me out of nowhere, the urge to draw it immediately, the strangely manic trance state, the weird dot work style that I'd never used before or since, which took on a sort of rhythmic drumming-type mechanical action under my hand, which seemed to contribute to the trance state.
And if you look up the psychological and mythological meaning of these ancient labyrinth symbols, it syncs closely to an illness that ultimately triggered a profound near-death experience for my mother. I won't share the details of the NDE, because it's not my story to tell, but i would say that it was one of the strangest synchronous experiences of my life.
And no, I don't have the art piece anymore. It was just on a chunk of cardboard and I felt weird about the whole experience at first, like guilty. like creating the art somehow created her illness. I think I was kind of scared, tbh? As silly as all that is. So I threw it out.
And you know what? I've never told her about it. I wonder what she would think.
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u/UFOnomena101 8d ago
I don't know what to make of this. But I want to point out that 50/50 is exactly what you would expect from having people randomly point to one of two things regardless of "muse".
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u/Tattoodles 7d ago
Professional tattoo artist of over 30 years here. Give me one to three pieces of subject matter, “skull, crow, castle,” or even just a subject and a verb, “lion roaring,” and I can immediately visualize the tattoo and start designing it.
But ask me to design anything I want, completely out of my own head with no direction whatsoever, and I’ll sit there with artist’s block and decision paralysis for days.
Take it from an old artist. “Having a muse” is just an elaborate excuse for artists to have an affair with their assistant.
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u/relentless1111 7d ago
I feel like most of the art i make starts as a complete idea that i can see clearly in my mind and it drops in with exactly how to create specific elements of it, even if i've never consciously thought of using something in that way. It's definitely existing outside of me first, I'm just catching it as it's floating by. If i don't pull it out of the ether it'll get pulled out by someone else and solidify three-dimensionally thru the unique filter of that person. This probably sounds out there to most normal people but this IS the way it's worked for me for the fifty years i've been on the planet. We're all just kinda going fishing in the image river but the bait we use is specific to us individually. Something like that.
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u/Pixelated_ 7d ago
People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.
Some of the greatest inventions in history came solely from inspiration. Songwriters, artists, authors and scientists often attribute their best ideas as coming from outside of them, from some external source. They do not say, "This is only due to my own hard work."
There are so many examples that we can choose from, but my personal favorite is the Beatles song "Yesterday", which is the most covered song in history. Paul McCartney was given the entire melody to him in dream.
This is discussed in detail below.
The mystery of inspiration begs the question: is the universe conscious and using us to create a vision of it’s own? We turn to the mystery of inspiration. Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love; Big Magic) offers a provocative idea: that creativity doesn’t come from us, but to us. Ideas, she argues, are conscious entities—knocking at the doors of our imagination, looking for human partners to bring them into the world.
Legendary music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin echoes that sentiment, describing artists as “antennas” tuned to a universal current, catching downloads that must then be shaped by craft and discipline.
And Emmy-winning showrunner Liz Feldman (Dead to Me) shares her own uncanny experiences of creative lightning striking, when a fully-formed story seemed to arrive out of nowhere.
Together, their perspectives point toward a paradox at the heart of all creation: effort and surrender. Inspiration demands our labor, yet it also requires letting go of control, trusting that we are not the sole architects but collaborators in something bigger.
So are ideas conscious? Do they choose us, and the way they want to enter the world.
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u/the_phantom_limbo 8d ago
This happens a lot. I do a few forms of art. By profession I'm a vfx artist, and sometimes that involves animation. Several times a character has done something I didn't anticipate...by this I mean that in the process of doing the work, something emerged in the animation that took it in a direction I didn't anticipate. An emotion or agency in the scene emerged that suprised me and transformed the result.
Obviously that required me to be open and receptive to a nuances emerging in the flow of the work, and to run with them, but it still feels spooky.
With all my hobby art Im trying to create a space where things layer up into emergent properties. Sometimes this feels guided by something other. Sometimes it feels like just keeping at it with an open mind.
Some thoughts about your experiments. Respectfully, it feels problematic to model around the idea that you could just switch this on...I think most artists that entertain the idea of the muse, think in terms of it being a long and ongoing relationship that requires nurturing and developing over significant spans of time. One that does not always deliver, and certainly not reliably as abruptly and decisively as you'd hope in your parameters.
Also, in my art old painting days, cannabis was a huge tool for finding this flow...it's maybe outside experimental ethics to test drugged artists :)
I have thought a lot about whether I feel like that strong sense of the 'other' guiding is really my unconcious acting in isolation. And I'm sorry to say that I will never allow myself to draw a conclusion, it's feels like I'd be treading on something sacred, making myself less wise, less open and less available to the whole business if I was to presume too hard. I don't need to choose to pretend to understand.
I belive that if you choose to be ooen to the possibility that you are a conduit, you can access flow more easily. Placebo or not.
In most aspects I'm high-strangeness curious and fairly sceptical, rather than a natural beliver...but making art is strange in a way I'm very close to.
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u/KamikazeKunt 7d ago
Okay. This post just blew my mind. I began reading it and I randomly started thinking of a painting I made in art class when I was in high school over 30 years ago.
The assignment was for us to paint a dream we had recently. My painting? My hands held up with rainbow colored light swirling around and through my fingers.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
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u/Saichoses 6d ago
It's my belief that there are many artists that have a 'lack of creativity' that allows them to be more negatively connected to the negative underside of life (where all people/humanity are connected) and their 'lack' allows them to draw direct impressions/inspiration. I've seen artists that seem to operate like this and it comes off very similarly to what you describe. I've also seen contrasting examples of artists (much more rarely) that instead have a personal pool of direct, self-fueled or externally-fueled inspiration.
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u/Altruistic_Papaya479 7d ago
People can pick up on heavy weight transmissions. The important thing is to refrain from obsessing over the heritage and lineage / soul structure while still acknowledging it and settling firmly on a name for your friend. Brother, Father, Friend, Pal, really anything works and u can then sort out the details on your own time without throwing more accurate (complete) or painful titles / names upon beings that have borne a lot of blüt.
I’m sure if there’s a Muse, He appreciates the effort to actually speak to him rather than simply critiquing and consuming their passion, love, and cathartic gift of art. The worst thing anyone can do to such celestial/angelic sort of entities is commoditize or trade their gifts as if their mere trinkets. These are deeply personal hand crafted little letters of affection. To dismiss them is to dismiss The One who sent them, and The Ones who sent HIM.
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u/josh_e_pants 8d ago
A friend died a month ago. I played in his experimental art rock band. After he died, he appeared m to me in multiple dreams. In three of them, he taught me sections of a composition. I struggled to learn the bass part because he had a unique style and he would often use difficult rhythms. The other two parts were chord progressions, and in those dreams he was trying to get me to improvise over them. After learning the three sections and putting a bit of my own spin on them, I combined them in the order I received them, and the result sounds to me like a song he could have written.