Four seconds in a creative's brain

Semi-conscious creativity on a Saturday morning.

I had just woken up from a dream, so the creative department of my brain was all warmed up while I was still yawning. It’s in this specific state that the proscenium arch in my imagination puts on elaborate shows for me to watch, lucidly. I can only really compare these visualisations to those morphing AI videos where things tentatively appear and constantly evolve, never solid for more than a millisecond.

I don’t brief any particular subject matter into these scenes, but there is an exchange of questioning and answering that I observe playing out in my thoughts. Not in formed sentences, but flashes of concepts, heartbeats of musings, rapidfire. Sometimes I reflect on them, I rarely write them down, and I always eventually forget them, but I found today’s especially interesting.

Currency. What if I designed a new currency?

A visual of all the world’s notes and coins in its typical muted colours scrolls past in a tornado.

Let’s look at coins.

A scooped hand appears holding gold coins. It’s a close up shot and the background is in shadow.

Coins are flat. What if the currency was more three dimensional. Round?

The coins twist into round, glass beads. Juicy, in pastel Spring colours. They look like dewy rosebuds but clack together like delicate marbles. There are the cents - pale jade beans the size of pomegranate seeds, with the same translucency. Then the dollars - pale pink baubles in a teardrop shape, like those 90s bath drops your mum had. And larger, more elaborate, tear drops in two or sometimes three colours depending on their worth, about the weight of an acorn. These looked like they had grown longer on the vine before being plucked so had the early forms of petal shapes and green stalks. All of them were subtly glistening.

But this currency was even more special than its appearance. Although they lightly clacked, these baubles were room temperature like a leaf, and air could pass through them like a cotton ball. If you held even a single bean in your closed hand and shook it, the wind would produce a musical note like a harmonica, so if you shook $2.80, for example, the beans and baubles would “play” together and vibrate a beautiful chord, pitched like wind chimes. The amount of money required for a purchase was confirmed through composing a brief song. Every song was beautiful, but the more “expensive” was a fuller more orchestral sound. To trade was to make music.

The frame zoomed out from the cupped hand to show a real exchange between customer and shopkeeper inside the kind of shop you’d find in Diagon Alley. The former enclosed their hand around the baubles and beans and gave it one good shake, up and down, as was customary, before pouring it into the shopkeeper’s hand. You could not place the money with a couple of fingers like a stack of coins, or dump it roughly, it was a slow and careful exchange where the edges of the hand cups touched for several moments.

There was no inflation in this fantasy, because the cost could not be more than could fit in an enclosed hand, and the people (or fairies?) would never want to discard the beautiful jade bean cents and their contribution to the sound. They even took delight in the maths required to find the correct amount.

And then I opened my eyes and had to think about breakfast and emails and which shoes to wear.

Please forgive me the next time you catch me daydreaming. It’s quite pretty there.