In dreams there is an experience I call a gronch. This word denotes the double-take that sometimes occurs in a dream when one recognizes that something unlikely is happening. For example, you discover a live unharmed bird is in your pocket. It all seems fine at first, then you realize this doesn’t make sense and form something which is the dream-equivalent of a question in response.

Gronch.

At that point, the dream will usually supply some form of pseudo-explanatory backfilling in an effort to override the gronch and sustain both the dream and the theme. There are a few possible responses. We may submit to the lull of the backfilling, in which case the dream usually continues relatively unaffected. We may find either the backfilling or the situation unconvincing, in which case we may generate a second gronch, etc. Or we may realize we are dreaming. This often leads to waking, but where it doesn’t it results in lucidity. So I think of a gronch as a branch that leads, at least in part, to a lucidity opportunity.

Now, there is something similar in our minds as it relates to thought. Much of the time we are dreaming, in a way. The activity is not all that directed or productive. But occasionally we get a signal that invites us to examine a relationship or significance from new perspectives. And it is possible to become aware of and follow this signal into insight and discovery; a kind of waking-life lucidity… and not merely in a stepwise process, but in cascades. As with dreaming the process is informed by what we will accept without asking questions. And as with dreaming it is difficult not to collapse the bubble of the experience into another knowledge-object. But there is a way of activating and ‘riding’ our own intelligence that is analogous to lucidity in dreaming, and it starts, I think, with a peculiarly precocious relationship to language, dreaming, and questions.