ShopSleep solves cryptics
July 9, 2009 by Christine
Filed under Christine's Desk, Mailbag
I get stuck on a word,
I go to sleep,
and when I awake, I can solve the clues very easily,
then I repeat it again the next night,
it works for me,
why is it?
Diana Saunders
I think our brains keep thinking while we’re asleep. It’s certainly happened to me as well!
This happens to me aswell. I think that there are many different reasons why, all varying on the person. With me I believe that this occurs because my mind has gone into overdrive, which clowds my concentration, therefore rendering me unable to answer relatively simple clues. I often find that putting my book away and focussing my attention to something else for a while helps immensely, if this happens at night a good sleep is the answer, during the day I find that relaxing with a chapter or two of the book that I am currently reading or doing something with my children is the perfect way to distance myself from that evasive answer. Then when I get my book out again I find that that clue wasn’t as difficult as I had first found it to be.
My daughter is almost 13, When she was 11 she discovered that she had inherited the crossword bug. Her first book was the very easy Crossword Collection which didn’t take long for her to outgrow, she now sees these books as “too easy”. She now picks one of the collosus puzzles from my monthly book and works on it. She finds these much more of a challenge and doesn’t fly through them. She often comes up against tough clues, my advice to her has always been when she can’t think straight, put the puzzle away, do something else and go back to it later. She also finds that this method works. She is deffinately going to be one of the next generation crossword buffs.