The War Against Your Thoughts

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The subconscious is older than language and perhaps smarter than your conscious thoughts. In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared on The Dating Game, a light-hearted TV show where contestants looked for love through a simple concept repeated many times before and since. An anonymous woman asked questions to three bachelors and based on their decisions, for they are anonymous, too, the woman picks one bachelor to take on a date.

[00:00:23]The date is then funded and arranged by the show. Armed with note cards, the questioner on Alcala's episode was aspiring actress Cheryl Bradshaw, who, following five to six minutes of flirty back and forth, not worth delving too deep into here, was asked which of the three bachelors she wanted to take on a date. She chose bachelor number one, Rodney Alcala.

[00:00:47]Alcala was revealed to Bradshaw and they embraced. Host Jim Lange then presented the two with their pre-planned activities for their date [music] before sending them off stage to become acquainted with each other. But backstage, Bradshaw felt something was wrong. As Alcala and Bradshaw talked, she couldn't shake some feeling that, for whatever reason, rejected Alcala. He just seemed off, creepy even. When the day of the date arrived, Bradshaw was nowhere to be seen. [music] Prior to the date, Bradshaw contacted the contestant coordinator and told her that she didn't want to go through with the date due to Alcala's, [music] in her words, weird vibes. And so, under no obligation, she turned Alcala down. The date never went ahead. Without Bradshaw knowing, she had done so for good reason. Two years following Alcala's appearance on The Dating Game, it all came to light.

[00:01:36][music] Alcala was convicted of the murder of a 12-year-old girl. With this conviction, many similar cases would be revealed.

[00:01:43]Unbeknownst [music] to Bradshaw during the time of the recording of The Dating Game, Alcala had committed many heinous crimes against young women, crimes [music] for which he would pay the price for until the end of his life following his 1980 conviction. In July of 2021, Alcala died behind bars with seven murder convictions to his name. However, it is believed he may have been responsible for many more, possibly hundreds. Something in Cheryl Bradshaw, some instinctive knowing, knew there was something wrong when speaking to Alcala in that backstage room, and this something quite literally saved her life. Sometimes we just know. How or why can feel impossible to say. A gut feeling, a red flag, a vibe, no real explanation. What we just know seems knowable beyond ourselves, and the reliability of this just knowing [music] is worth considering when it raises its head. Many times we hear cases like Bradshaw's, albeit not as extreme. The instinct knowing something we don't and communicating that knowing in the only way it knows how, feeling and image.

[00:02:42][music] It is a valuable tool, the instinct, as it understands more than we give it credit for, yet we rarely give it that credit. Bradshaw unknowingly made a life or death decision on a vibe.

[00:02:53]Her antenna rejected Alcala, and for that she was spared. But not all cases have to be life and death. Our instincts guide what we say, what we decide to wear, or where we choose to go. Our instincts influence everything, and no matter what is being influenced, the influence itself holds greater weight than we ever give it credit for. I'd argue that listening solely to that influence will serve you better than any external guiding light. In 2017, American writer Cormac McCarthy published a rare piece of non-fiction.

[00:03:23]The piece was called The Kekule Problem and tackles the role of the subconscious in daily life, as well as its incompatibility with language. Roughly speaking, McCarthy says humans have existed for 2 million years, whereas any language's lifespan is much smaller. He says language has been around for roughly 100,000. As the subconscious is older than language, McCarthy asks, is it possible that the subconscious is wiser than the conscious mind, [music] but just less capable of articulating that wisdom, or maybe it simply refuses to communicate in the same way as our conscious mind.

[00:03:57]Problem solving has proven the worth of the subconscious. When we have a problem, we try to solve it consciously, thus using language as the method to do so. If, however, after hours of toiling away at the problem, we can't solve it in the moment, our subconscious takes over without our knowing and begins to work on the solution in the background.

[00:04:16]"This is what thinking is," says McCarthy. "Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language, and language remains a handy tool for [music] explaining them. But, the actual process of thinking in any discipline is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived, a sort of milepost, so as to gain a fresh starting point. But, if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems, I wish [music] that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it." Language shapes the unconscious into something understandable. When we sleep, our brains continue working and often solve the issues we cannot solve ourselves. Sometimes it happens when we're awake as well. However, it is language that articulates the work the subconscious has [music] done, therefore acting as a milepost to the endless thinking occurring in the background.

[00:05:06]When the subconscious has found a solution, it won't directly communicate as you would through language, i.e., "The answer is X," but do so through abstractions, symbols, and feeling. And what better place for those modes to be articulated than in dreams?

[00:05:20]The Kekulé problem's title derives from a famous anecdote of the subconscious solving a problem and presenting the solution in a dream. In the 1800s, a German chemist known as Kekulé was trying to figure out the structure of benzene, a mystery pondered by many chemists at the time. Kekulé remained perplexed by this mystery for months on end until one night, whilst asleep, he dreamt of a snake coiling around itself and eating its own tail. When Kekulé awoke the following morning, he had his answer. The structure of benzene was a ring forming into itself. Kekulé's dream is a famous example of the subconscious mind solving a problem, but our subconscious can also guide us in other ways, too. For the purposes of brevity, however, I will only focus on the creative guidance inherent in the subconscious. Many artists rely on their subconscious for inspiration. David Lynch, Karl Ove Knausgård, André Breton, Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, Comby, etc. To take one of them as an example, in the early stages of his career, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård hit a roadblock and spent five years without writing anything of substance. He had published two novels at the time, Out of the World in 1998 and A Time for Everything in 2004. But, following these two, he had simply lost his ability to write. He would begin a story, hate it, discard it, and try again. This process lasted for five years. Eventually, having exhausted all of his patience with himself, he decided to simply write without constraint, without second-guessing himself.

[00:06:50]>> [music] >> He began writing from his instincts. He would wake up, pour a coffee, and write.

[00:06:56]That was it. He didn't know what was going to happen, nor where the story would go. All he demanded of himself was for himself to stick to his commitment.

[00:07:05]Within two years, he had published six novels and found [music] success in his writing. The story he had so desperately wanted to express, that had taken five years to do so, culminating in a stop-and-start affair for those five years, had now extended to 3,000-plus pages, all under the My Struggle series.

[00:07:22]Knausgård has continued this mode of writing up until present day. Everyone's relationship with their subconscious is different, however. Knausgård, you could argue, relied on his more than McAfee, as the writing poured out of him. For McAfee, it seems as if the subconscious was some sort of creative compass.

[00:07:39]Nonetheless, the role of the subconscious and creative instinct played a crucial role in McCarthy's life and career. With topics regarding instinct or the subconscious, we risk presenting the artist's role as nothing more than a puppet on the strings of the subconscious. That is something I certainly don't want to do. Evidently, the artist needs the varying artistic skills honed through conscious hard work that make articulating the subconscious' wishes a realistic endeavor because the subconscious can only feed us ideas. It cannot do the work for us. The trick then is to allow yourself to listen to these ideas. However, sometimes it can be hard to do so. Our conscious minds tend to get in the way of these instinctual ideas because we compare ourselves to others or we allow our egos to take command. Ideas do not always correspond to who we think we are or should be as artists or even as people generally. We may follow a certain artist and want to be like them, make art like them, have an influence like them despite our subconscious feeding us ideas to oppose this want. When this happens, it can be easy to then disregard the idea, but I'd argue that to be a mistake. David Foster Wallace famously said that what made David Lynch so great was that he was entirely himself. I believe this to be the same for all great artists and I believe the only way to be entirely yourself is through listening to yourself, i.e. your subconscious.

[00:09:02]To become entirely yourself is to listen to your instinct and follow its lead.

[00:09:06]Solutions are entirely capable of flowing from ourselves if we allow them to. The subconscious cannot, in no uncertain terms, tell us what to do, but we can choose to listen and be willing to act on our best interpretation of its message. Ideally, that message being the great idea. When interviewed by Oprah in 2007, McCarthy gave a characteristically vague answer to a common question asked of writers. How do you know when your book is done? McCarthy responded as such, "Well, you just know. You've told the story and that's it. I think it's just part of the whole enterprise. The same thing that tells you what to write tells you when to stop writing it. The thing McCarthy is referencing here is his subconscious, the birthplace of his ideas and desire to write. We talk a lot about the mastering of one's craft, but we rarely do of the mastering of one's instinct. McCarthy mastered both. He didn't force the ideas, but he did force the creation of the idea itself, the give-and-take of the creative process.

[00:10:06]McCarthy followed the lead of his idea through mountains of research and hours of writing, listening to this instinct, gut feeling, vibe, whatever, all the way through to the end. The beauty of the instinct is that it is inexhaustible. An artist lies in wait for the big fish, as David Lynch would say, and allows himself the headspace to catch it. Once caught, the artist gets to work. The subconscious and/or instinct never stops and thus never runs out of things to tell you. At times, it seems no ideas are coming, but even that itself is a message or an idea, a message telling you to wait, to try something new, live regular everyday life. Anything could spark the next idea, and anytime could be a new burst of inspiration. And when so, perhaps the next idea will be the next great work of art. Or maybe the next idea will save your life.