“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything” – Alice Walker
Read on or listen to the audio to explore:
The key role of imagination in Jungian psychology & transformational growth
The implications of living in a time of dangerous fictions
Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella “The Old Man & The Sea” and what it has to teach about the power of imagination to reveal deeper truths
Image: Sean Manning/Pexels
Holding onto imagination in an age of egocentric capitalism
When I was young, I imagined fairies lived in the circle of apples trees which stood like a convention of elders at the bottom of my garden. My greatest ambition was to be a flower fairy, like the ones in my illustrated collection of Cicely M Barker books, and grow my own wings. I also imagined that the actual wolf from Red Riding Hood freely roamed in the woods near my house and that - if I wasn’t careful - he would eat me up, too. Meanwhile, I loved writing stories and would lose myself for hours in the creation of my own imaginary worlds.
I recently found an essay by nine-year old me on “Being A Grown Up”. Confronted with the enormity of viewing myself as something so remote, I reflect that “I’m going to be a nice sort of grown up. I will never dream of kidnapping anyone (when I think of it, it gives me nightmares). I’m going to keep - or at least try to keep - my imagination. I love my imagination very much and hope it grows up with me.” As an afterthought, I add; “It’s a pity mummy and daddy can’t grow up any more than they are because it’s so exciting in the different stages of growing up.”
I can confidently say that, as of yet, I’ve never kidnapped anyone. While I’m happy to report that I’ve ‘kept’ my imagination. Although it’s perhaps truer to say imagination has kept me - and that it’s through and with the benthic depths of this numinous inner realm, that I’m still growing up through the different stages of life. Which remain exciting – if, at times, also terrifying. Although, last time I checked, I’ve yet to grow wings.
That I’ve ‘kept’ my imagination, however, is no thanks to what happened next. Just a couple of years later, our class was told by the stern-faced English teacher Miss Boucher that, now we’d arrived at the grand age of eleven, we were “too old” to write stories. I don’t blame Miss Boucher, who I think genuinely felt she was equipping us with the necessary skills for getting on in the world. While I also suspect Miss Boucher was once told something similar herself. In fact, I remember the ecstatic glow radiating from behind her glasses as she read to us from an ancient copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and wonder if grown-up Miss Boucher secretly wanted to be able to write stories, too.
Sadly, not a lot has changed since the days of Miss Boucher, in that we remain caught up in a system of ego-centric capitalism and patriarchy where creativity and imagination continue to be marginalised and devalued. Which is not to say that logic and reason aren’t important - but rather that the thinking mind only knows what it knows and problems arise when we live and act as if that’s all we are. As Albert Einstein famously said;
‘I am enough an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’
An independent intelligence
Carl Jung took the fact that our dreams produce images which we play no conscious role in creating as evidence that imagination is an independent intelligence outside of us, whose language is metaphor and symbol. Indeed, we are the only species on the planet born with the capacity to imagine and it’s through imagination that we learn, innovate and create. While Jung went as far as to claim;
‘Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of imagination... The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.’
More recently, Jungian analyst Stephen Aizenstat has teamed up with a neurotech company to develop a headset called “the crown” (which sounds a bit like the contraption worn by Alex in a “A Clockwork Orange”, except less menacing) that’s capable of measuring changes in the brain waves of its wearer. Aizenstat found that, when in deep imagination, the alpha and beta waves of those wearing the crown were reduced and the theta waves that enable our capacity to accommodate paradox and ambiguity, as well as our ability to create, were increased.
‘There’s a reciprocal relationship between imaginal intelligence and embodied wisdom… getting a larger perspective supports creativity,’ says Aizenstat. ‘Engagement in deep imagination creates a measurable shift in our state of consciousness. As IQ4 (imaginal intelligence) grows, neuroplasticity increases and new brain networks develop. In other words, a new consciousness evolves.’
Surfaces & depths
In an age of dangerous fictions, which degrade consciousness and flatten the truth, it seems more important than ever to seek out soulful fictions that strengthen imagination and hold deeper truths. So it was that in the opening chapters of 2025, at a time when the grown ups in charge have stopped even trying to be nice, I re-read Hemingway’s 1952 classic. On the surface, the novella that won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature is a simple tale. An old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, hasn’t caught anything for 84 days and is considered saleo - “the worst form of unlucky” - by the villagers, with the exception of Manolin, the young boy who brings him coffee.
We meet Santiago in old age when “he no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”
So it is that on the 85th day, Santiago sets out on his ancient skiff and hooks a fish. Only this particular fish – a marlin twice the size, from nose to fin, of Santiago’s boat - refuses to give in. Thrashing for its life, the fish pulls Santiago further and further away from the shore by the length of line attached to the hook piercing its mouth.
Day turns to night and night to day. Santiago suffers sunstroke, blisters, hunger, thirst, cold and cramp. Yet, like his adversary the marlin, the old man, too, refuses to give in. “A man can be destroyed,” he ponders out loud to the gulls. “But not defeated.”
More time passes and Santiago finally vanquishes the fish. But his victory is short-lived as a shiver of sharks start circling the boat, drawn by the scent of fresh meat. Broken, weak and miles from land, it’s touch and go whether Santiago will make it back. (Spoiler alert) eventually he does. But not until after the sharks have summarily polished off his prize, leaving nothing but bones. Nonetheless, the villagers are astonished by the size of the marlin’s carcass and welcome Santiago as a hero. But by now the old man is borderline delirious and barely able to stagger to his cabin, which is where we leave Santiago as we found him, fast asleep, dreaming of lions. All things considered, a nice sort of old man.
Among the shimmering shoal
As I read Hemingway’s novella, I was there inside his luminous imagination, by turns burning in the merciless sun and hallucinating beneath the cold blaze of stars, in awe of the majestic marlin, while dreaming of killing it - caught up in the foolishness of believing I could ever really possess it.
But beneath the novella’s glittering surface, I glimpsed the fin of a tale about writing and setting sail into the unconscious, pulled along by the fish of a big idea, only to encounter the limits of language and the sharks of self doubt. I saw the glittering scales of an adventure tale about hope, overcoming adversity and finding success in the sunset of life. And the gleaming incisor of a cautionary tale about failure, loss and the brutality of biting off more than you can chew. I caught the flash a slippery tale about trickery and who gets to have the last laugh. And the long, curving spine of a heroic tale about the courage it takes to confront your own shadow and look death in the face. And, somewhere further below, I saw the waving tendrils of a spiritual tale about a man meeting his soul in the form of a fish.
Then, once I’d adjusted my eyes to Hemingway’s masterful dazzle, in amongst this shimmering shoal of stories within stories within stories, I saw, hidden in plain sight, a salty tale about the sea inside and the power of imagination to hold onto the line, commune with the fish, find our way home and dream of the lions forever playing on some faraway beach.
Let’s discuss in the comments below
Where do you see imagination devalued in the culture, and where do you see it celebrated?
What stories, books, films etc do you think hold complexity and point to deeper truths?
If you’ve read “The Old Man and the Sea” what are your memories and experiences of doing so”?
Depth writing prompts
Write about a memory of imaginative play as a child. You can take yourself there more deeply by writing about this experience in the present tense. Or write a story for children where an ordinary event becomes a big adventure.
Write a creative response to Hemingway’s line “a person can be defeated but not destroyed.”
Free write about the sea. A trip to the sea. Swimming or sailing or fishing or diving in the sea. Dreams about the sea. Imaginary seas. Surreal, fantasy & mythical seas. Ancient seas. Extinct seas. Future seas. What images, associations, memories, thoughts, feelings and emotions come up?
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