The phrase 'nuit blanche', translated (probably incorrectly) into Cornish above due to that being the language of the region in which I now live, is used throughout the world to describe night-time arts festivals, full of music, colour and life. I've seen it variously translated as 'white night' or 'sleepless night' and other similar phrases. I first came across it as the title of a Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3, an episode that discussed the processes of people who create things at night, including writers, artists and composers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011481 I had also recently come across a post on Instagram saying something along the lines of how creative people need time to sit and do nothing to help come up with ideas, to think, to process things. Some may view this as simply an excuse to procrastinate or to diminish the work of creatives, i.e. 'not a real job' (as the head of the school of music at my alma mater said in my first year as an undergraduate, "music is better than working"), but anyone who creates anything will, to some extent I reckon, recognise this as true.
Somewhat humorous examples related to nocturnal creativity from my times of genuine procrastination (social media, online videos etc) include the classic moment from an episode of my favourite guilty pleasure YouTube channel that uploads clips from Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where a waitress informs a bemused Gordon that the 'Carletta' sauce had come to chef Dino in a dream (cue characteristic swearing and intense eye rubbing from Ramsay); writer, producer and director Ed Solomon tweeting ( https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1220799242513649669?s=20 ) an offer of the rights to whatever he had thought of and a picture of a torn-off bit of cardboard next to his bed with the following scrawled on it:
Hidden
It goes deeper- and UNDER it where you find it
EMERGE
*
(That thing from earlier)
and Chaz Hutton's (one of my favourite online artists who does amazing comics and stick figure portraits, including of me, https://www.instagram.com/p/CUpMpYvAYHf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link ) hilarious reply to said tweet, talking of how he woke up with an email to himself stating the undeniably genius idea of "microwaves, BUT NOT". https://twitter.com/chazhutton/status/1220816836599648256?s=20
I bring this nonsense up because as a composer, I have experienced similar things. While the warning I got from lecturers at uni that the life of a composer involves late nights editing and finishing pieces hasn't yet come to pass (perhaps it will with future projects or commissions or whatever), I have had flashes of inspiration at inconveniently late (or early) times of day. I've been lying in bed before falling asleep and had to reach for my phone to record a rhtyhm or melody into the voice memos app to both get it out of my head so I can fall asleep and so I don't forget it in the morning. This also extends to more developed ideas, which has led me to sit up and turn the bedside lamp and laptop back on after the time I had already decided to lay my head down to sleep, and write out this weird idea I had recertly for some kind of string quartet/piano/percussion thing, into Sibelius. I have also, like the fabled carletta sauce, dreamt of more fully formed pieces, such as an odd and not particularly interesting choral chord sequence which I then pretentiously and unnecessarily entitled 'Oneiros'.
Even if nothing is done with these often unpromising ideas straight away, it has paid off more than once for me, as even if you're left with a Sibelius file with just a few bars or a small recording taking up memory on your phone of your weedy voice humming a short idea at 1:30am, one day you might find you can dip into this bank of sketches and fragments and use one or more as the start of a full piece.
So that quote from the beginning about how we need time doing very little in order to be creative seems to ring true, even if sometimes it seems like I need to be doing the very minimum, i.e. literally trying to fall asleep, for some good ideas to appear.