I want you to write a little original story of about fifty words.

You will note the three words that I have italicized. I italicized the word "original" so that you will appre­hend the full significance of the requirement; and I similarly treated the last two words so that you will not be justifiably frightened at the task suggested.

After all has been said and done, however, you may not find it altogether easy to write something original; for what I mean by that specification is to evolve some little story out of your own mind, and without consciously borrowing a single idea from anything you can remember to have ever heard or read.

I want you to try your best to create a story.

It will not make any difference what your topic may be. You may treat of love or hate, fishermen or fairies, art or industrialism, of ethical aspirations or materialistic desires; it will not affect the outcome of the experiment in the least. You may write of the here and the now, or take a jump back into the Mid­dle Ages if you care to. Or you may retrace the in-
tellectual footsteps beyond the Garden of Eden period in the evolutionary history of mankind if you are able to make any such mental effort.

Literary merit need not be considered. Your sen­tences can be so jumpy that each and every one of them may look as if it were afraid of each and every other one.

There is only one condition in this mental experi­ment, and that is the one which I have indicated in the opening paragraph of this chapter—originality.

Try to create something.

I want you to take your "original" story and split it up into its elemental parts. For example, if you have written of some imaginary being sailing some moonlit sea, playing a strange instrument and singing some weird song; while out of the mists a phantom audience listens, and a strange yet beautiful musical accom­paniment seems to vibrate through the air; or if you have some other seeming jumble of ideas, write down the various elements. Make a sort of inventory of them, somewhat as follows.

Strange being—sailing—craft (inferred)—moonlit sea—strange musical instrument—song—singing— phantoms—audience—beautiful music—vibrations, etc.

Now take these elements of your "original" story and use them, each and individually, as stimulus thoughts for developing free associations of ideas.

When you have done this you will find that you have not created anything. You will find that every idea in your "original" story has been evolved from some particular set of memories in your great uncon­scious mind, memories which your flows of ideas have revealed to you.

You will find that every contributing feature in that little literary "creation" of yours is based upon unconscious factors, and that when you wrote your story you were consequently controlled by uncon­scious influences. You will find that your conscious mind created nothing.

Take each element of your story in turn, hold it for a second in the consciousness, and then let go. Side­track your intellectual controls wholly, and let your mind liberate some other idea simply and solely by reason of the existence of some association between them. In an intellectual sense, sit back and simply watch the procession of ideas that passes across the horizon of consciousness. As far as your consciousness is concerned, keep out of it. Let the unconscious mechanism work for once without any intellectual in­terference.

When you comply with these conditions you will not be very long in ascertaining from whence the "original" ideas in your story were derived.

Every form of conscious conduct is motivated by definite and ascertainable unconscious processes.

We think as we do, we feel as we do, and we act as we do, simply and solely by reason of definite in­fluences that exist in our unconscious minds.

When I asked you to write an original story, in an effort to make things clear to you I gave an illustra­tion and used the following sentence:

"If you have written of some imaginary being sailing some moonlit sea, playing a strange instru­ment and singing some weird song; while out of the mists a phantom audience listens, and a strange yet beautiful musical accompaniment seems to vibrate through the air; write down," etc.

I now want to show you from where those ideas sprouted in that little "original" work of yours, and I think that the best way in which I can make this clear will be to show you, as an illustration, the sources in that seemingly foolish jumble of my own ideas that were jerked out of my mind without any conscious deliberation on my part.

Here is the way in which I spread out the elements of my own "original" story for analytic dissection:

Some strange being—sailing some moonlit sea— playing a strange instrument—singing some weird song—a phantom audience—some strange yet beau­tiful musical accompaniment—vibrating through the air.

As soon as I threw my tendencies of critical con­sciousness "out of gear," and thereby allowed the un­conscious mental mechanism to run freely, I trav­elled fast in my thought associations.

I mentally found myself on the Mediterranean. Time, about five in the morning. There was a morning haze on the water. The liner Herefordshire was draw­ing near to Stromboli, the famous Lipari volcano. Then, flash, came the idea of Kubla Khan, the mys­terious character in Coleridge's famous poetic frag­ment of that name. Then, immediately, the source of the ideas that "jumped out" of my mind in my little illustrative "original" story became revealed to my consciousness.

Let me say that when I finished writing the first part of this chapter it was about noon of yesterday. In the afternoon I had some work to do which did not relate to the preparation of this manuscript, and which kept me busily engaged until about six o'clock. After leaving my den I had some spare time before sitting down to the evening meal, and I thought it a good opportunity to do a little mental angling for the purpose of ascertaining where those strange "original" ideas of mine came from in the morning when I wrote my illustrative story spontaneously, and without one single moment of reflection.

I will say at this point that I have never learned six verses of poetry in my life. I will also say that the reason why I have never done so is because I am not able to do so. I have an exceedingly bad rote memory.

I further want to say that I don't think that I have ever read through Coleridge's Kubla Khan completely more than once in my life, and that occasion must have been over twenty-five years ago.

 With these few explanations before you, let us now compare the elements of my "original" ideas with actual lines of Coleridge's famous poem:

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