In 1981, I got a letter from Pinter in which he said that he had read Awakenings when it came out in '73. He had immediately thought, this is stuff for stage, but he couldn't think how to deal with it and he put it out of his mind, and it had stayed out of his mind for seven years. But then the previous summer, in the summer of 1980, he said he had a dream, didn't know what it was, but he awoke with the first words and the first scene of the play in his mind, ‘Something is happening’. And the play then wrote itself in three days. So this was a wonderful description of what I regard as almost a paradigm of the creative process, that first there is wrestling with a problem consciously and not getting anywhere. And then you let it go and you forget it. And then it has been incubated outside at levels inaccessible to you, so you don't know anything is happening, and when it's ready, it erupts into consciousness. What FWH Myers calls ‘subliminal uprush’. These are the three stages Poincaré speaks about with mathematical invention, and I think these were the three stages which Pinter has talked about, and he included the play, which I... I read with great delight.

The more so, as seven years earlier I had been sent a play also inspired by that particular case history from a playwright in Philadelphia who said that he had just read Awakenings and he was so excited, he said he was obsessed by what was going on and... and he'd written this play, and it was... and it was going to be shown in Philadelphia and would I like to come to the opening? And I wrote back and said, slow down a bit, you know, this has not been discussed. I said, in fact, there is already... a dramatic option has been taken on Awakenings, and I think I... I think you need my permission. And... but if I... if I like it we'll find a way of doing things. He sent me the play and I cringed as I read it. I cringed because it was so close to Awakenings. I cringed because it was a... a parroting and a paraphrasing and an aping and a mimicry of Awakenings, and I wrote back, I used some excuse, I said, I'm very sorry but, in fact, the patient herself and her large family are alive, you know, and this will definitely be seen, and I... and I don't think you can go ahead. But I felt that this playwright, you know, had immediately regurgitated Awakenings, and he had not let it go down into the depths, and this... this struck me as, you know, the Pinter play brought home the difference between real creation and... and this sort of mimicry.