It's peculiar that literary mimes of the stream-of-consciousness are most aesthetically pleasing and insightful when they seem to best represent the so-called 'default mode', that murky and multi-threaded self-centred musing that takes up the largest part of waking consciousness when you are not engaged in any focused or creative activity. As if the highest creativity is expressed in representing a state that is at best passively and whimsically creative, but generally not creative at all. It's like a sort of mental compost, rich in many broken down and decaying fragments and disjecta of past engagements. On one side it is the blankest and most useless of states but on the other it seems to have the deepest foundations. The trouble with focused states is that the mere presence of an active will flattens them, the will creating a kind of backstop or limit to penetration. The absence of active will or even of self-consciousness in the default mode opens the back channels even as access to them is blocked buy a buzz of mental parasites, or static. This is probably why psychoanalysis prefers free-association, which is merely the default mode with commentary, and with an (implicit) listener. Perhaps, taking a cue from stream-of-consciousness, it is time to revalue this mode, if only for its absence of all striving?