I – Imagine that!

What if you could see your imagination?

Imagine you are closing your eyes right now. Now visualize yourself on a beautiful pristine beach. It is a pleasant sunny day, yet not too hot with a light breeze.

You feel the warm sun warming and energizing your skin. You hear the waves gently lapping on the sand.

You are completely alone on the beach and feel completely safe. You reach down and take your shoes and socks off and place them on a towel on the sand. The grains of sand feel warm and energizing on your feet as you walk along the sand. You hear the faint sound of seagulls in the air…

This is the beginning of a meditation guided script. If it is successful you see in your mind a picture that only you can connect to. It may be a beach near you. It may be one that you visited long ago. In may be an unknown beach that is be created by your mind as the scene is being described to you.

Leaving the meditation behind look at what your imagination is doing. It is creating a picture or a story. It creates a movie of an experience you’ve had, one you wish you had, or one that is just an invention of your mind.

There are studies you could search for on the web to explain what parts of the brain are active when you imagine. What mental workspace is being created in your head? Which conditions are optimal for helping you imagine things There are theories about how imagination helps us, makes us more creative, improves learning, and motivates us to do things.

But what I’d like to pursue, is what if we could see our imagination? Not just in our heads, but outside our physical being. Think about what it would be like to see your imagination at work on a TV screen. “Hey, I just came up with a new idea. Let me show it to you.”

Think of how much easier it would be to manipulate the scenes that you are seeing in your head if you could send them to a piece of paper and then be able to write, edit, revise right on that paper and the scene would change similar to the guided script’s scenario.

When I write songs, I imagine a tune, usually when I’m sleeping. If I’m lucky I’m near a recorder where I can record the tune; I get up and record it so that I don’t forget it. See http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=41. From there I have to imagine lyrics that would go with the tune, and think of a theme that goes along with it. It would be so much easier if I could just imagine me singing the song and then be able to transfer it directly to a screen where I can watch my imagination’s finished product.

There are some negative consequences to being able to see your imagination. Remember the advice for public speakers who have fear of speaking to an audience in public, “Just imagine that the audience is all sitting there naked”. If that video or picture popped up during your speech or performance so that others could see it, it could be problematic. And then there are other fantasies that you might imagine, following movies, books, or just desires that you might not want people to see.

If we had the ability to see our imagination, I would hope that we had some control over what we see in public viewing and those that we keep in our heads; sort of like a mental mute button. Imagine how you would use that skill. That would definitely be cool.

And what if you could read other people’s imaginations and thoughts. That might be something to explore in another blog. Think about it.