Red In A Blue World by Bob and Donna Sellers
The meaning of the stories in our art can be both direct and indirect. Those persons viewing the art might realize that the story represents a particular issue in their real life or might be a metaphor, indirectly representing an issue in their life.
Research suggests that people who engage their imagination in some creative way, may lead to a more positive and hopeful mood state than people who don’t use their imagination. Imagination is stimulated by our story art and encourages enjoyment and possibly further understanding of self and others.
An important variable is what you do with your imagination. Imagination when used to think of, or foresee the future, is projecting creative energy forward, like shaping a positive outcome, or creating a believable perception of the future that attracts you rather than a future that is discouraging. Imagining the future is a form of fiction. Allow your imagination to create a story you want for yourself, one you believe will work for you, a story that contains elements of life that please you, a story that will put juice into your daily existence.
Everyone lives a story. Our personal story, conscious or unconscious, is determinative. Our story defines who we are and who we are not. Our personal story is like a corral in which we live. Beliefs and behaviors which appear outside of our own corral are not believed to be who we are and therefore are often rejected as untrue. If your life needs something, someone, some adaptation that is not you, then enlarge and expand your story to include the characteristics that you want or need.
My practice as a therapist involved guiding people to use their imagination to create a new story more useful to them than the one they came in with. I called my work, “Imaginal Therapy.” In practice it ignored everyday reality in favor of a parallel metaphor that symbolically represented their reality. Symbolic Parallel Metaphors are easier to shape and evolve with fiction than the reality that people believe they are stuck with. It was what you would call an oblique approach to help people get to where they wanted to be. This approach was a very creative and an enjoyable experience for both myself and the client.
Imagination and Self-Discovery
If one chooses a particular character in an art image to role-play or write about, projecting their imagination into it with some amount of depth, their imagination may bring about a change of their self-definition, allowing them to be adaptive in some way that they may not have been in the past. You have to bring your characters alive as you write, giving them feelings, thoughts, perceptions, prejudices, fears, strengths, etc. and including all the characteristics you want them to have. Your imagination may lead to growth, conscious or unconscious, that may surface in some way and lead to change in some future moment in time. We provide suggestions on how’s to get started in your writing for those wanting to go this direction with our art, leading to a deepening of understanding of self and others in their lives.