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Wakefulness and Creative Imagination

 Is there really a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? Isn't

wakefulness another form of dream? Isn't waking another form of sleep in the sense that much of

our waking life is a life of low consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)?

Perhaps we are facing a continuum of experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize

into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetic experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it

should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures.

Only basic emotions are literal insofar as they point to some survival action. The rest is symbol.

If we consider reality as a complex symbol, the traditional border of sleep-wake psychology

vanishes. And what scene do we have before us then? What is experience? Our experience is a

shared myth built from successful survival actions. But beneath these actions is the mystery of life

itself, towering over something equally mysterious that we vaguely call matter. And in the bosom of

life, the mind has arisen, emerging with it new movements of determination of reality. This

continuum of Life-Intelligence, of which we make vague mental representations and of which we

have intense vital representations (but also imprecise), shows a force that seems to be a combination

of the vital and mental worlds, a force that operates in the line of the numinous experience. It has

traditionally been called "creative imagination", or "active imagination". I understand this force as

an impulse of expansion of Life-Intelligence outside the limits of symbols related to everyday

experience, it is a second-order symbolic force, like general abstraction, but endowed with a unique

emotional vitality and directed by a principle of self-mimesis. This creative imagination is no more

illusory function than any other mental map can be. In fact, the intensity of its impulse throughout

our entire existence as a species presents it as a sure guide of our being in the world. Through it

have manifested forms of reality that practical reason would never have revealed. Its action is not

limited to the world of dreams, where it is fully active in most of us, but works in our vigil when we

are able to put aside the urgency of survival. Then, not only our mind but all our self enters a

second-order symbolic experience (a reflection about symbols themselves).

The intensity of the creative imagination will determine the intensity of the aesthetical action.

Such intensity depends on the degree of presence, the actual focusing of consciousness in us.

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