Imagination is the intellect’s creative force. Before the concrete idea is the imagined and desired state. When that comes into bloom, the inner world thrives, and our productive capacity expands.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. [Albert Einstein.]
When we imagine, we may abandon rationality temporarily but the process, overall, is rational and thoroughly reasonable: when one seeks a changed state of affairs, there are many tools on which human beings can draw to bring that about. Imagination is among the most important of them. It is a creative and useful process if the person does not spend excessive time on daydreams or fantasies without acting on them productively, and so long as the person recognizes the difference between fantasy and reality. Great inventions have been the products of such fancy, and will remain for as long as the human animal remains what it is.
“Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality.” “Imagination is not just a peripheral feature of cognition or a domain for aesthetic research. It is instead the core operating system or cognitive capacity for humans and has epistemic and therapeutic functions that ground all our sense-making activities.” Researchers have identified “two dimensions and ten indicators of imagination . . . The first dimension is ‘creative imagination,’ which includes the indicators of intuition, sensibility, productivity, exploration, and novelty. The second dimension is ‘reproductive imagination,’ which includes the indicators of focusing, effectiveness, transformation, crystallization, and dialectics.”
“Humans use imagination for a variety of reasons: to acquire experience and knowledge about the world, to better understand another person’s perspective, to solve problems, to create and interact with artistic works, and more.” “. . . imagination has a major role in human creativity, agency and everyday thoughts and actions.” “Through its fundamental relationship with metacognition, imagination increases our capacity to learn, enables personal and potentially, democratic capacity.”
“There seems to be at least some role for imagination in science . . .” “The cycle of imagination and experimentation is the key for any research discoveries or pathways. The ability to imagine (hypothesis) and then test it through experimentation would yield a scientific conclusion. This process is known as a hypothesis-based research.”
“The astounding capacity for the human imagination to be engaged across a wide range of contexts is limitless and fundamental to our day‐to‐day experiences. . . . processes of imagination are central to human psychological function . . .” Imagination may be a skill that can be cultivated and developed.
Imagination is not an unalloyed good. “Imagination, often celebrated for its role in creativity and development, also may be a feature in a range of personality pathology and psychopathology.” When we fail to distinguish fact from fantasy, imagination can lead to unfounded beliefs.
Duchamp’s “Portrait of Chess Players” celebrates both the artist’s imagination and that of his subjects. Though success at chess is a function of making the right moves at the right time, no player is sophisticated enough to take into account every possible move or strategy by an opponent. For that reason, imagination is an essential attribute of a developing chess player.
Real
True Narratives
Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be! My garden would be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and smells. But when the eye of my mind is opened to its beauty, the bare ground brightens beneath my feet, and the hedge-row bursts into leaf, and the rose-tree shakes its fragrance everywhere. I know how budding trees look, and I enter into the amorous joy of the mating birds, and this is the miracle of imagination. Twofold is the miracle when, through my fingers, my imagination reaches forth and meets the imagination of an artist which he has embodied in a sculptured form. Although, compared with the life-warm, mobile face of a friend, the marble is cold and pulseless and unresponsive, yet it is beautiful to my hand. Its flowing curves and bendings are a real pleasure; only breath is wanting; but under the spell of the imagination the marble thrills and becomes the divine reality of the ideal. Imagination puts a sentiment into every line and curve, and the statue in my touch is indeed the goddess herself who breathes and moves and enchants. [Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1907), Chapter I, “The Seeing Hand”.]
Leonardo’s primary activity in many of his formative years was conjuring up pageants, performances, and plays. He mixed theatrical ingenuity with fantasy. This gave him a combinatory creativity. [Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 521.]
Narratives:
- Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (Yale University Press, 1978).
- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Viking, 2011): “brilliant, exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book . . . about everything,” by an eccentric but gifted physicist with absolute confidence in the merits of his work and a difficult writing style; Deutsch sums up the unifying ethical theme of his work: “The only uniquely significant thing about humans . . . is our ability to create new explanations.”
- Francis Spufford, True Stories and Other Essays (Yale University Press, 2017): “His unifying perspective in ‘True Stories’ is the virtue of imagination, and the search for alternate worlds or possibilities raised by counterfactual questions. Thus, in his opening section, eight essays on cold, he examines the records of various polar expeditions and celebrates Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s travel masterpiece, ‘The Worst Journey in the World.’”
- David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018): “. . . the biography of an idea — a heretical, groundbreaking idea — and its many midwives, chief among them Carl Woese, ‘the most important biologist of the 20th century you’ve never heard of.’”
- Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography (Liveright, 2021): “After his death in 1935, the trunk was discovered, brimming with notes and jottings on calling cards and envelopes, whatever paper appeared to be handy. They were authored not only by Pessoa but by a flock of his personas (‘heteronyms,’ he called them): a doctor, a classicist, a bisexual poet, a monk, a lovesick teenage girl.”
- Desmond Morris, The Lives of the Surrealists (Thomas & Hudson, 2018): “Dali is one of 32 surrealists that Morris depicts in Lives of the Surrealists, including famous figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miro and lesser-known artists like Leonor Fini, E. L. T. Mesens, and Wolfgang Paalen.”
- Desmond Morris, The British Surrealists (Thomas & Hudson, 2022): “. . . this follow-up volume gathers 34 artists just too recherché or too British to be included in the earlier compendium.”
- Glenn Adamson, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024): “Adamson defines (futurology) broadly as the practice of predicting what’s going to happen to society over an extended time period, using any form, from science fiction to actuarial tables.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Peer-reviewed journals:
- Imagination, Cognition and Personality
- Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning
- Journal of Mental Imagery
- Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny arched chamber, very cosy, very warm, seated at a table which appeared to ask nothing better than to make some loans from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed in prospect, and alone with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked of enchantment. He began seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes about him from time to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire, harnessed to two-winged chimeras, which alone could have so rapidly transported him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately upon the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality, and not lose the ground from under his feet completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary space, now hung only by this thread. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VII, “A Bridal Night”.]
Novels, stories and essays:
- Pam Munoz Ryan, The Dreamer: A Children’s Novel (Scholastic Press, 2010): “From the time he is a young boy, Neftalí hears the call of a mysterious voice. Even when the neighborhood children taunt him, his authoritarian father ridicules him, and he doubts himself, Neftalí knows he cannot ignore the call.”
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Scholastic Press, 1998) “is as funny, moving and impressive as the story behind its writing. J. K. Rowling, a teacher by training, was a 30-year-old single mother living on welfare in a cold one-bedroom flat in Edinburgh when she began writing it in longhand during her baby daughter's nap times. But like Harry Potter, she had wizardry inside, and has soared beyond her modest Muggle surroundings to achieve something quite special.”
- Thomas Keneally, Napoleon’s Last Stand: A Novel (Atria Books, 2017) “imagines Napoleon’s final exile through the eyes of a young girl.”
- Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (Doubleday, 2016): “It doesn’t merely tell us about what happened; it also tells us what might have happened. Whitehead’s imagination, unconstrained by stubborn facts, takes the novel to new places in the narrative of slavery, or rather to places where it actually has something new to say.”
- Mark Haddon, The Porpoise: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019): “Haddon’s writing is beautiful, almost hallucinatory at times, and his descriptions so rich and lush and specific that smells and sights and tastes and sounds — foam smashing across a boat’s deck; a breakfast of olives and barley bread soaked in wine; a woman trapped alive in a coffin — all but waft and dance off the page.”
- Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories (Knopf, 2019): “I think of my work as maybe not so much focused on technology or a particular technological invention, as more with the idea of scientific exploration in general.”
- Marcial Gala, Call Me Cassandra: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Raúl first determines that he is Cassandra when he has a vision of Athena, as some 20 other children torment him for being effeminate.”
- Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds: A Novel (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020): hundreds of earths exist in this science-fiction novel. “The multiverse is real, and Adam Bosch has figured out how to move people among 382 versions of Earth; his company, Eldridge, extracts information and resources from those worlds. The only catch: You can’t travel to an Earth on which a version of you is still alive.”
- Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet: A Novel (Penguin Books, 2005): “The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus.”
- Everina Maxwell, Ocean’s Echo: A Novel (Tor Books, 2022): “Sci-fi romance is a high-wire act: An author has to build a unique external world while also establishing a compelling interior landscape. It’s thrilling when it goes well — and I’ve rarely seen it done better than it is here.”
- Alan Moore, The Great When: A Long London Novel (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024): “Moore seems to see the refusal to face reality as a failure of imagination. And since imagination is the realm he has been dutifully exploring and mapping out . . . its defense is especially important to him.”
Poetry
Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at, / What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass, / What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed, / And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning.
My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, / I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision.
Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, / Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, / Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, / Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, / Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, / Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, / I tread day and night such roads.
I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product, / And look at quintillions ripen'd and look at quintillions green.
I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul, / My course runs below the soundings of plummets.
I help myself to material and immaterial, / No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.
I anchor my ship for a little while only, / My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.
I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.
[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Book III: Song of Myself, 33.]
Other poems:
- Giacomo Leopardi, “The Infinite”
- Emily Dickinson, “The Brain is Wider Than the Sky”
- Robert Frost, “Bond and Free”
- Pablo Neruda, “Poet’s Obligation”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Your commitment to kindness and civility might lead you to say that jazz legend Sun Ra was peculiar but in most circles you would be forgiven and probably understood if you said he was crazy. He was convinced that he was from the planet Saturn, and spoke of “altered destiny”. For a time, he embraced an idea called Afrofuturism, which “centers Black history and culture and incorporates science-fiction, technology, and futuristic elements into literature, music, and the visual arts.” (See these books on Sun Ra and Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist, and William Sites.) Sun Ra left a strong musical and discographic legacy and was the main subject of two documentaries, “Space Is the Place” and “A Joyful Noise”. We may never know what led him to his remarkable way of looking at not only the world but the cosmos, or what he thought any of that had to do with music. But we do have these lyrics from his song “Imagination”: “Imagination is a black carpet / On which we may soar / To distant lands and climes / And even go beyond the moon / To any planet in the sky / If we came from nowhere here / Why can’t we go somewhere there?” For the man who was named Herman Poole Blount, the African experience in America was so abhorrent that he imagined a different reality to replace it. In that, he was not crazy. We are a symbolic species. We can imagine the impossible and the absurd. While we may want someone more firmly grounded in reality leading our space program, Sun Ra and his remarkably unique imagination made a major contribution to music. He is the main subject of a book by John Szwed; a set of interviews and essays edited by John Sinclair; and a collection of his prose and poetry edited by James L. Wolf & Hartmut Geerken. Here is a link to his playlists. Below are links to some of his albums:
- “When Angels Speak of Love” (1963)
- “Heliocentric Worlds” (3 volumes) (1965) (109’)
- “Nothing Is” (1966) (65’)
- “The Magic City” (1966) (47’)
- “Sound of Joy” (1968) (49’)
- “Atlantis” (1969) (43’)
- “It’s After the End of the World” (1979) (49’)
- “The Night of the Purple Moon” (1970) (45’)
- “Discipline 27-II” (1973) (46’)
- “Lanquidity” (1978) (43’)
- “Unity” (1978) (45’)
- “Sleeping Beauty” (1979) (30’)
- “On Jupiter” (1979) (30’)
- “God Is More Love Than Can Ever Be” (1979) (38’)
Albums by other artists:
- Paolo Fresu, “Tango Macondo” (2021) (50’): a tango of the mind only, this is a soundtrack album of real and imaginary landscapes. “The soundtrack builds an ideal bridge between Mamoiada, the town of Barbagia famous for the legendary Carnival with its diabolical and grotesque masks, and Macondo, the imaginary place born from the dreamlike and mythical universe of Gabriel García Márquez.”
- Julie Tippetts & Martin Archer, “Illusion” (2022) (142’): for better and worse, we interpret and imagine – this is more about the stories than about the music.
- Swarupa Ananth & Melisa Yeldirim, “Hues of Imagination” (2023) (32’) “reveals the power of music to connect people beyond time and tradition”.
- Pat Thomas, “The Solar Model of Bin al-Shatir” (2024) (40’) is reminiscent of Sun Ra, in a few ways, as is the title of this album.
Compositions:
- Though Charles Koechlin never visited Iran, he composed a set of sixteen piano pieces expressing an imagined trip. Listening to Les Heures Persanes (The Persian Hours), Op. 65 (1913-1919) (approx. 70’), is like riding in a dream on a musical cloud. He also composed an orchestral version, Op. 65Bis (1919) (approx. 58’) of the same pieces.
- Constant Lambert, Horoscope (1937) (approx. 37’) is a ballet about astrological myths.
- Lord Berners, The Triumph of Neptune (L’Umo di Baffi) (1926) (approx. 37’) is a ballet about the mythical god Neptune and the “people” who surround him. “One of the great eccentrics in music – so you can imagine just how loony he was – Lord Berners unfortunately survives as a character, rather than as a composer. He kept a specially-made piano in his Rolls-Royce, dyed the pigeons on his estate all sorts of surprising colors, and was famously ugly and a wit.”
- Arnold Bax, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew (1931) (approx. 17-18’) is a lovely tone poem in which Bax brings pine trees to life.
- Bax, The Garden of Fand (1916) (approx. 17-19’), conveys “(t)he basic idea of a mortal being enticed away by supernatural forces . . .” It has been conducted by Boult, Beecham, Thomson, Handley, Slatkin, and Lloyd-Jones.
- Hans Abrahamsen, Schnee (2008) (approx. 54’): inspired by Bach’s canons, the work explores the movement of time. “Schnee explores the idea that our perception of nearly identical patterns causes the imagination to project new forms by itself . . .”
- Louis Vierne, 24 Pièces de fantaisie, Opp. 51, 53, 54 & 55 (1926-1927) (approx. 68’)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- The Beatles, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (lyrics)
- David Bowie, "Life on Mars?" (lyrics)
- Jack Johnson, "Banana Pancakes" (lyrics)
- Maria Thompson Corley, “Lucid Dreaming”
Visual Arts
While Duchamp's "Portrait of Chess Players" hints at the ability of the creative person to alternate with facility between primary process (e.g., dreams) and secondary process (e.g., reason and logic) thinking, many of our great artists, especially the surrealists, mainly emphasized primary processes. In expressing primary process through the visual arts, perhaps the surrealists, impressionists and others gave us essential tools for drawing the essential distinction between fantasy and reality. The most striking example of this may be the work of Salvador Dali:
- The Whole Dali in a Face (1975)
- Battle in the Clouds (1974)
- Path in Púbol (1973)
- Modern Rhapsody (1957)
- The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
- The Broken Bridge and the Dream (1945)
- Invisible Bust of Voltaire (1941)
- Spider of the Evening (1940)
- The Endless Enigma (1938)
- Dreams on a Beach (1934)
- The Dream (1931)
- The Dream Approaches (1931)
- Playing in the Dark (1929)
- Late Night Dreams (1923)
Other extraordinary works include:
- René Magritte, The Imaginative Faculty (1948)
- Marc Chagall, Monsters, Chimeras and Hybrids
- Norman Rockwell, Boy Reading Adventure Story (1923)
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Film and Stage
- The Purple Rose of Cairo, about imagination as a bridge to a new reality
- Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau(Celine and Julie Go Boating), about “the fanciful world of two women literally lost in the stories they tell each other” showcases “the dotty logic of dreams”
- Terry Gilliam’s trilogy “about imagination versus reality” explores imagination as an escape from reality: Time Bandits (review); Brazil (review); The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (review)
- Billy Liar, about a man with a “fertile ability to dream, to weave fantasies of himself as various heroes accomplishing bold and glamorous deeds”
- Heavy Traffic: on imagination as a means of escape