Take a picture. A real one. One that de-picts something. Something recognisable. Something that does not require imagination. A house? A car? A soccer field? A beach? And then you conceal it. Hide it from the view. De-construct it. De-materialize it. Change its appearance. Until nobody will see or recognise it anymore. Unless: you imagine it. You think about it. Feel it. Let it reverberate. Follow it on your mind. Re-discover it. Re-create it.
And then you start telling the story. The story of what it was when you could see it and what it became on your mind. And of what happened in between. The story on your mind. Your unique story. What you perceive. What you feel. What you imagine. Yes. What you imagine.
This is the miracle in art. We don’t need to see or to hear. Or we only need to see or hear once. Have something that creates a starting point on our mind. And from there on our imagination begins to write a story. We create. We imagine. We start telling a story that is uniquely ours. The power of imagination allows us to enter a space full of pictures, sounds, feelings. All things that do not exist in what we call reality.
And of course phantasies can even happen without an external starting point. We have pictures, words, ideas on our minds that just spring up, that just evolve, that create a world of our own. And we can use them to surf the wave, to enter the flow, to be happy and to thrive.
I see a difference between creative imagination and the on-going revolving door of the mind that gets concerned with every little aspect of our lives. Petty thoughts and feelings that we cannot control, things that occur to us and evoke a response that is nearly out of the control of our consciousness. That is how aggression occurs. How thoughts perpetuate. How things get murky and muddy. And this is not what I would call creativity or imagination. It is more the restless monkey of our mind that sits in its self-afflicted cage with the helpless desire to escape.
Imagination however is radiant. Imagination associates and develops something into and onto a higher level. Imagination gives us an opportunity to grow. It gives us the opportunity to transcend. Imagination makes us happy and it makes us smile.
Have a nice day dear reader. Surf on the clouds of your mind….