Here we find the girl relaxed in bed at night, an ideal creative situation. However, although she seeks and seeks her lover, and calls him, he does not appear. Finally, she goes out into the city streets to look for him there, but still she does not find him – and is soon apprehended by the patrolling Watchmen. As soon as she passes them by, however, she immediately finds him.

The City Inside Your Head
The city in the “Song” is a metaphor for the mind, and the Watchmen, plural, represent attitudes, assumptions, false ideas and beliefs that hinder and block our creative efforts. As soon as we break away and pass them by, creative action can be resumed.
Notice that the Watchmen find the girl – a further confirmation that they represent conditioned ways of thinking, habits that automatically step in to control our thinking unless we take conscious control and deliberately THINK.

Watchers on the Gate
One reaction the Watchmen typify is knee-jerk hostility to new ideas, an attitude so prevalent that in Brainstorming, Alex Osborn, found it necessary to separate the generation of novel ideas and the evaluation of their possible worth into separate sessions.

Even the wildest ideas may contain a valuable breakthrough principle if carefully analyzed. The son of engineer Barnes Wallace, who invented the famous bouncing bomb used by the RAF to destroy enemy dams during World War II, commented that the idea of skimming the spinning bombs along the water surface, the way a child skims flat stones on a pond, was just a "silly suggestion" that someone made when all other ideas had failed.

In “How to Invent”, Meredith Thring describes the same phenomenon, saying: "An essential characteristic of the creative state is that one’s critical faculty which normally inhibits all new ideas is completely switched off. Thus ideas are born, many of which will be killed when the critical faculty is switched on again, but others can be followed up by further ideas which meet the criticisms if one is still in the creative state."

Thinking About Thinking.
In order to change our habits and evade the Watchmen, we have to become self-aware, and start thinking about thinking, and question supposed “facts” the we and the world unthinkingly accept as Truth. A simple procedure for overcoming assumptions is known as Adaptation (APPENDIX D).

Mental Conditioning
In “The Road to True Professionalism”, based on a lifetime of training designers and managers to achieve excellence, Matchett stresses that the major obstacle to excellence was the “CONDITIONING” that he found in most of his students – attitudes such as fear of the unknown, lack of confidence, pride, fixed ideas and inflexible approaches.
As a result, his prime objective became to help them become self-aware, to monitor their working methods and discover the weaknesses in their thinking that were limiting their creativity.

Getting Out of Prison
In a letter to a friend, Vincent van Gogh describes his own struggle to escape imprisonment by the Watchmen, saying: "Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep, serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force, but without this one remains in prison . . . And the prison is also called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance or one thing or another, distrust, false shame".

Creative Butterflies
Creative ideas are ephemeral and easily be forgotten. Like the girl with the lover, we must take firm hold and not let them go.

Jack Addington says that insights arrive with the delicacy of a butterfly and can speed away again just as quickly. Do not make the mistake, he says, of assuming that you will easily remember the interesting insights that may come to you whilst you are driving the car or half asleep in bed.

Lewis Carroll said: "Sometimes an idea comes in the night when I have to get up and strike a light and note it down — sometimes when out on a lonely walk, when I have had to stop and with half-frozen fingers jot down a few words which should keep the new-born idea from perishing — but whatever or however it comes, it comes of itself “.

A Reminder
Solomon seems to be reminding us in the last lines of this section that the reason for our creative barrenness may simply be that we are still trying to rush the process instead patiently playing and waiting for our creative partner to be aroused.