Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

In this “unexpected delight” (The Boston Globe), visionary filmmaker, musician, and actor David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish provides a rare window into the internationally acclaimed filmmaker’s methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch’s personal vision. And it is equally compelling to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.

Catching Ideas

Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.

—from Catching the Big Fish

David Lynch advanced to the front ranks of international cinema in 1977 with the release of his first film, the startlingly original Eraserhead. Over the course of his career, Lynch was nominated for three Best Director Academy Awards (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive), won the Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart, swept the country with Twin Peaks mania in 1990 when his groundbreaking television series premiered on ABC, and established himself as an artist of tremendous range and wit. David Lynch died in January 2025.