A Figment of Your Imagination

"A figment of your imagination --something imagined or created by your mind."   Cambridge Dictionary

A relative of  mine started seeing things a few years before she died, One of her recurring visions was of a  homeless family who lived under a picnic table across the street from her house. She could see them clearly from her kitchen window. For a while the local police department was kind enough to indulge her fantasy and show up when she called. Eventually they were not able to keep up with her requests for help and she had to deal with it alone.

Because of the way our imaginations work, she was actually seeing these people. They existed as clearly in her brain as I did when I appeared on her doorstep.  The brain makes no distinction between what we see and hear and what we imagine. Don't you wake up from dreams that were as vivid as any "real" experience you ever had?   So to say, "It was just a dream" is not quite accurate is it? Black Elk, a medicine  man of the Lakota Sioux, had a profound vision during a life-threatening fever as a child,.This vision shaped his entire future.  What he saw and felt had an even more profound impact on him than the fact he fought  at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and later was present at the Massacre at Wounded Knee, I had a beautiful dream in 1982 that stayed with me for several days.  I sought out a minister friend who said, "God has given you an epic dream.  If  you look at the dream and figure out what it means, it will change the direction of your life."  I did. And it did. That was thirty five years ago and I can tell you that dream frame by frame. It not only changed the direction of my life at the time, but it predicted something that would not happen to me for ten more years. "It was just a dream" is a gross understatement. "It is just in your imagination" isn't quite true either.

The problem with our brain's incredible ability to conjure alternate realities is that we allow it to work against us. Fear, anxiety, panic, worry, grief, regret, remorse and a whole host of negative emotions appear to us to be real when they're not.  Well, I contradict myself. They appear to be real like this computer desk is real when in fact they are only real like our dreams are real. If a neurosurgeon opened your skull and probed your gray matter to find the dream you had last night, he would never find it. But you can still remember it. It's somewhere.  If he looked for your intense fear of snakes there would be no particular neuron are group of brain cells that would contain that fear.  That fear does not exist in that sense anywhere in your body.  And yet walk up on  a snake in your back yard and the fear is more real than the snake itself. The "fight or flight" response is usually flight in this case unless you happen to have a hoe in your hand.

I was thinking about all this earlier today after I was pricked by a painful memory.  It was a memory of something that happened over forty years ago. There is nothing about that situation that exists, Some of the people involved exist, but the situation does not exist.  But the pain I felt this afternoon was real. The pain did exist.  I need to make up my mind, don't I?  Did it exist or did it not exist? It did exist, but only in my imagination. I made it up.

The good thing about the imagination is that we can change it on a whim. If we don't like the way our thoughts are making us feel, then we can think about something else. At first you may think that this is impossible, but with practice it becomes second nature. "Make believe you're brave and the trick will take you far.. You can be as brave as you make believe you are."(Whistle a Happy Tune from The King and I).

I want to offer one last contradiction and then bring this somewhat convoluted discourse to an end. Not all emotions can be changed on a whim.  Grief is one of the most pervasive and powerful emotions we experience. There is no grief like that of losing your own child. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, I found myself in a grief support group of bereaved parents for a year.  I had not lost a child, but they allowed me to share my story of loss and grief with them. As they told their stories of loss over and over, the pain was just as fresh each time. Talking about the pain with supportive people helped, but it certainly didn't make it go away. Unfortunately, that  particular pain never completely goes away.

Whereas, I do not want to suggest that you can  flip a switch and illumine all your emotional darkness, I do want to suggest that overcoming most negative feelings is possible and is necessary for a full and meaningful life. In the case of my painful memory today, I talked myself off the ledge (so to speak). I had a conversation with myself about it and we both agreed that it was ridiculous for me to invest any time recalling that particular event.  We both agreed that I was probably the only one who had given it any thought all those years ago. What possible benefit was there in conjuring it up today?  None at all..

Have you ever ventured into The Journey Into Imagination at Epcot?  If you did, you heard Figment sing his delightful theme song One Little Spark--"A  dream can be a dream come true, if just one spark lights up for you."  Everything we see at Walt Disney World, every Disney movie we watch, every song we hear began in Walt Disney's imagination.  Imagine that. He thought up the whole thing.  Albert Einstein said that the human brain is the most incredible creation in the universe. As a Jew during World War II, he had plenty to worry about.  And plenty to break his heart. But his worries were relatively few.  He had better things to think about.  And so do we.