The mind is the seat of trance. The ways that we think, consciously and unconsciously, shape our creative process and structure its creative trance. Every thought we have, every movement we make, changes the landscape of our brain, producing its own neural signature from the solution of everyday problems to meditations that progress toward transcendent states. With its contradictory styles of thought, creativity has a unique assembly of neural processes not usually found in ordinary cognition, and is associated with the release of dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin, and can be shaped by insight and synesthesia. Cognitive neuroscience reveals the heterogeneity of creative trance states through activation of different brain regions, such as the medial temporal lobe memory network, the prefrontal cortex, both brain hemispheres, and significantly the default mode network, which is associated with divergent thinking and daydreaming. As the Nobel Prize–winning pharmacologist James Black said, “I daydream like mad.”

Creativity, an apex of consciousness, contains the altered states of a creative trance that are treasured across cultures and time. Ranging from the creativity of everyday life to the reveries that inspire works of science and art to the fast-moving action of sports that shape and reshape personal goals, the creative trance can also be a transcendent experience, an ecstasy using the body’s own pharmacology. There are multiple depths of a creative trance, from light enjoyable flow states to deep experiences obliterating all external stimuli. The degree of depth can correlate with the psychological capacity for absorption. The creative trance relates to the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Openness, Big-C and little-c creativity, Wallas’ four-stage creative process, and Barron’s concept of a habitually creative person. The creative trance can be a pivot to personal transformation, creating new work and a new view of the world, and may also bring the capacity for transcendence.

We live an unpredictable unrepeatable yet creative existence. Revealing the underlying patterns of our thoughts and behavior, nonlinear dynamics provides models to understand our lives and our creativity as ever-evolving human beings in a constantly changing universe. As the writer James Baldwin said, “the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” The creative trance, modeled as a creative chaos, brings forth new work and personal transformation. With its disciplines of chaos theory and complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics explains processes like creativity that do not progress in a straight line, cannot be predicted, never exactly repeat themselves, and yet have the capacity for originality and transformation. There are aspects of nonlinear dynamics such attractors, fractals, self-organization, emergence, the butterfly effect, and self-organized criticality that strongly correlate with the creative process, insights, the power of memories, global transformation, catharsis, and transforming panic attacks into creativity.

Worldwide, we are an aging population, with dementia affecting people in increasing numbers. Here we focus on two types of dementia: Alzheimer's disease because it is the most prevalent form of dementia and the primary progressive aphasia of frontotemporal dementia because of its capacity to enhance creativity in music and visual art. For individuals with progressive dementia, the creative trance is an oasis, a world apart from the daily world of their growing difficulties. Instead, they face the solvable problems of creativity. Iris Murdoch wrote her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma, during the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and Willem de Kooning focused on painting as his dementia advanced. Sometimes, dementia can influence work for the better, even if only for a brief time. Frontotemporal dementia gave power to Maurice Ravel’s best-known work, Bolero, and Anne Theresa Adams, who also had frontotemporal dementia, resonated with the music, and transcribed it into visual art.

Whatever affects the brain structures the creative trance, and what we view as imperfections may instead be alternate pathways to achievement. None of us is perfect, but as Jung says, we have an inner dynamic wholeness that transcends perfection and fuels self-evolution. The creative people in this chapter use dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, now known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to access their wholeness, and this, in turn, drives and shapes their creative trance. Eminent writers with dyslexia include Agatha Christie, William Butler Yeats, Jules Verne, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Amadeus Mozart and Frank Lloyd Wright used the reveries of ADHD to create completed works in their minds, and Leonardo da Vinci who had both dyslexia and ADHD changed the course of Western art history. What makes life most difficult can also inspire strength, innovation, and genius. As the poet Emily Dickinson writes, “A wounded deer leaps the highest.”

Just as illness and difficulties punctuate our lives, so do times of healing and achievement. As an experience of recovery and renewal, healing through self-expression is a creative process and a triumph of the creative trance. It can bring the possibility of a new self, new work, and new aspects of existence. Illness influenced Itchiku Kubota to expand his designs of Japanese textiles and kimonos. Addressing both emotional and physical pain, healing with creativity can occur through the creative arts therapies and in individuals. By using her creativity in hopes of healing the world, Greta Thunberg healed her difficulties with speaking. Paradoxically, impairments may augment the creative trance by becoming a transforming illness, as in Ludwig van Beethoven’s increasing deafness that imparted greater power to his music. Even when a condition is terminal, and there is no cure, there can still be healing with an altered, yet profound form of creative trance.

Empathy and dissociation form a paradoxical and dynamic fusion of opposites in the creative trance. Inherently structured by its domain, cultural traditions, personal preferences, and rules to achieve excellence, the creative trance is an experience of empathy connecting the creative person with the work produced, while dissociation separates the trance state from waking consciousness. Empathy can enhance sports performance by intuiting the moves of an opponent. Stanislavski’s system of empathic acting revolutionized film and theater, and in science, Alexander Graham Bell felt he became one with his machines. Some empathic people view creativity as their children; Charles Dickens called David Copperfield his “favorite child.” Dissociative inspiration can seem to originate from a Muse or divine source; Giacomo Puccini believed his opera Madame Butterfly “was dictated to me by God.” Cross culturally, dissociation in ritual trance possession where dancers assume the identity of deities, may bring numinous experiences for both performers and audiences.

We live in a multiplicity of personal worlds, all connected through the power of our unconscious mind and its capacity for trance. This vast unconscious, far larger than conscious awareness, appears to initiate all our movements. The cognitive unconscious, with its perceptual-cognitive abilities, automated motor skills, and implicit memory, facilitates creative expression while clinically, our unconscious emotions, internal conflicts, and repressed desires drive the inspiration and passion of a creative trance. Relinquishing conscious control in the creative process can be a type of artistic projective identification. As the visual artist Joan Mitchell says, “the painting tells me what to do.” Unlike the slow sequential thinking of the conscious mind, the unconscious is a parallel processor quickly integrating multiple variables to bring depth and complexity into the creative process. It carries out multipart repeated behaviors that become automatic fluid expertise, as in the violinist no longer concentrating on finger positions and the archer instinctually positioning a bow.

We are creative primates who evolved from creative primates and as our cognition increased, so did the complexity of our creative trance. In the evolutionary history of our symbolic communication, even early works suggest altered states and transformation of the self. There are archaic artifacts with symbols that intimate initiation and life after death, prehistoric images on cave walls intended to influence both affect and reality, and talismanic objects linked to altered states, rituals, pain relief, and healing. Our toolmaking evolved from simple Lomekwian and Oldowan stone tools, to the increased aesthetic choices of Acheulean handaxes, to Paleolithic ritual objects with archetypal symbolism encoding spiritual rebirth. As humans progressed, their repeated cultural interchanges through the ratchet effect transformed a five-thousand-year-old Near Eastern hammered dulcimer into the modern grand piano. Beginning with everyday needs, our creativity advanced to plans that could alter civilizations, expanding human cognitive capacity with external memory devices like alphabets, computers, and the digital cloud.

Different abilities enlarge the terrain of the creative trance. By demonstrating the extended capacities of human beings, challenges widen the possibilities for everyone. Not all conditions can be “cured,” but healing is always available through self-transformation. Differently abled people experience altered states in sports competitions, the Paralympics, dance, wheelchair dance, music, science, and visual art, sometimes without limbs, vision, or hearing. They share a triumph of achievement gained through accomplishing something that was at one time thought to be impossible – perhaps even by them. There are physically integrated dance and theater companies for people of all abilities and a long lineage of blind African American music professionals. The effort to confront impediments alters the neural landscapes of their brains and empowers their creative trance. As the world champion wheelchair dancer, Piotr Iwanicki says, “When I’m on the dance floor, nothing matters at all. Dancing is all my life. It’s my passion.”

In those moments, or seconds, or hours, when focus on our creative work overrides input from the outside world, we are in the altered state of a creative trance. Shaped by individual experiences, social circumstances, and cultural traditions, the creative trance is multifaceted and psychologically significant. Taking numerous forms throughout the sciences, arts, sports, and self-transformation, it can change the world. At age sixteen, Albert Einstein’s visualization of riding on a light beam became a basis for his theory of special relativity. It can also be the inner deliberations of both Mozart and Shostakovich, who composed finished music in their minds. Cross-culturally, meditation and sleep are central to a creative trance. The Native North American Chippewa weave dream images into their beadwork and banners. In addition to the trance of creation, there is an audience creative trance of reception that ranges from pleasant enjoyment to the overwhelming response of the Stendhal syndrome.

Creativity and its trance states can extend to lifesaving acts of heroism that far exceed ordinary human limitations. By entering a creative trance in the middle of a raging forest fire, the firefighter Wag Dodge invented a new way to reroute the path of flames. Altered states can also occur when individuals lift a multi-thousand-pound vehicle to rescue a person trapped beneath it. They display what is colloquially called hysterical strength, which this book calls extraordinary human strength (EHS). With its enormous power and focused open mind, EHS has congruence with extreme yoga capacities in the philosophy of Patanjali. There is a possible dominance of the dorsal system of the brain in EHS and potential effects of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. An inquiry into the origin of its power examines quantum sources, such as vacuum energy and possible chameleon scalar fields with suggested correspondences in neural quantum processes and Eastern philosophies.

Milton Erickson is the most famous contemporary hypnotherapist, as well as a legendary psychotherapist. At the age of seventeen, he narrowly escaped death from poliomyelitis, but continued to suffer from residual paralyses that worsened later in his life. This chapter relates how such experiences taught him the power of the unconscious mind and the trance state, and led him to pursue a career in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy. It also discusses Erickson’s view on trance, his relationship with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and his influences on a new generation of innovative psychotherapists. Also covered are discussions on the nature, origin, and importance of the “altered state of consciousness,” the importance of such phenomena vis-à-vis the evolution of our species, as well as the role “altered state of consciousness” has played in the history of psychiatry.