I went to bed late yesterday, I felt sleepy but I wasn’t able to get past the REM phase during at least an hour. I would close my eyes and have imagery emerge naturally. Perhaps I can control the imagery I thought, and sure enough, not only images emerged, but images in motion. I was quite delighted and begun imagining animations that I have to implement for the game. Animation tends to stump me, I have to experiment a lot to get attractive solutions, but in this state I was able to project images in motion. This is icing on the cake, so I will leave it for last and to confirm the validity of REM imagination.
In the morning I went to the study hall and implemented the features that I had proposed to myself yesterday. As I had a series of tasks to do on the codebase, I missed my notebook to jot down the steps, but then I thought: how strange, this is the first time I miss my notebook. In beast mode the tasks find you.
As I was walking back home for lunch I lamented the loss of my focusing super powers. I had lunch, a nap, and as I was walking back to the study hall it stroke me: this is simply a different state that brings a new approach into the project. If I were hyper-focused all the time I wouldn’t be able to see different facets of the problem I’m trying to solve. The mind is still engaged, but it’s seeing the forest and not the trees.
With this in mind I was able to use my energies better. I also saw a lot of the code with a different perspective: beast mode code is also trees and not forest, so I took some time to refactor the shortcuts I had taken. At the end of the day I had gone further than I had intended, the codebase was in better shape, and I implemented a pair of features which will vastly improve the gameplay.
Beast mode is over, but what is this new state? I’ll keep on working to find out.
Edit: I just noticed I had written 2018 on all my 2019 entries until today (Jan 7). Corrected. I guess the new state is already manifesting itself.