Here's a pretty good example of "George" (Arthur Ellison's term for an active agent in the unconscious) at work.
Last night I was working on a problem in a puzzle book, in which you had to add a single letter to a word and then rearrange the resulting letters into a new word. I did most of them, but got stuck on two:
B + CANOE
G + TUNER
I couldn't get these. Before giving up, however, I decided to let George take a whack at it. I focused on each of the problems and requested a solution.
This morning I picked up the puzzle book again, not having thought about the problem since last night (at least, not consciously). As soon as I looked at the page, I saw the answers:
BEACON
URGENT
I did not have to think about it.
The obvious explanation is that George patiently turned over the problem, arranging and rearranging the letters, until he found the answers. Then he waited until I remembered the puzzle, at which point he pushed the solution into my field of awareness.
An interesting question is: How much creative thought is George capable of? The above example did not require any creativity, just an ability to keep reshuffling the letters until a meaningful pattern emerged. But in other cases, I've found that leaving a more involved problem to my subconscious can yield the same kind of result. For instance, if I am stuck on a plot point in a novel and I let my subconscious handle it while I think about something else, I will usually get the answer the next time I focus on the problem.
Other writers have reported much the same thing. Robert Louis Stevenson famously talked about the "sleepless Brownies" of his unconscious mind who did all the real work of planning his books and stories.
Fixing plots, or even concocting them out of whole cloth, is more complicated and more creative than simply doing anagrams, so I have to assume that George has some degree of creative skill – or (perhaps) that he serves as a conduit for discarnate minds possessing this skill.