4
The Inconstant Imagination
Imagine a tiger, as clearly and distinctly as you can. Try to create a mental photograph, or, better still, add a third dimension and summon up a mental hologram. If your tiger moves and roars, so much the better. Our powers of imagination seem to differ a lot from one person to the next. Some of us report that we can conjure up an entire zoo of squawking and wriggling animals, while some of us (including myself) find imagining even a single animal to be something of a challenge. Oddly, though, after a little time with my eyes shut, rather compelling images of tigers do sometimes appear, at one moment leaping, at another, prowling the jungle floor.
When our visual images are at their most compelling, most of us have the impression that, perhaps only for a moment, we have created a fairly accurate, detailed, colourful, ‘mental tiger’ – indeed, it can feel as if we are ‘watching’ this creation as if projected on an inner TV screen1 or perhaps, if we have a strong ability to create mental images in 3D, from the stalls of an inner theatre.2 Your ‘inner tiger’ may not feel quite as vivid as the experience of actually facing a tiger at close quarters – but your inner tiger may feel richly detailed none the less.
According to common sense, and to the theories of many psychologists and philosophers who study our ability to form ‘mental images’, such an image is something like an inner picture or perhaps even a 3D copy of the world. From this point of view, examining a ‘mental tiger’ is rather like scrutinizing a picture of a tiger, or perhaps peering at a real tiger. Indeed, mental pictures seem to be just the kind of thing that the mind creates during perception, but in the case of the imagination, of course, there is no external object.
Consider, for a moment, the pattern of stripes on your ‘inner tiger’. A warm-up task, popular among psychologists and philosophers interested in imagery, is to try to count the number of stripes on your inner tiger’s tail; and then to count the number of stripes on the body. This is surprisingly difficult to do – and you may start to suspect that your image doesn’t contain quite enough detail to accomplish this task. Perhaps you can ‘zoom in’, say, on your tiger’s tail. But is the number of stripes on the ‘zoomed-in’ tail the same as the number of stripes on your original mental tiger? And, for that matter, I find I can’t really count the stripes convincingly, even when I have zoomed in – my image just doesn’t seem stable enough to give me a reliable answer. So examining a mental image, however vivid, seems very different from examining a real image (e.g. a photo of a tiger).
Let us focus instead on something more basic, concerning not the number of stripes on your ‘mental tiger’, but the way the stripes ‘flow’ over its body. Ask yourself if the stripes run along the length of the body or all round the body like hoops? And now consider how the stripes flow along the tiger’s legs: do they run down the length of each leg, or, alternatively, around each leg? And finally, what happens to the pattern of stripes where the pattern on the legs (whatever that is) joins the pattern on the body (whatever that is). In fact, just so that you can be really sure that you have a crisp and precise image in your mind’s eye, you might want to draw an outline of your tiger, however rough, and sketch in your pattern of stripes.
Once you’ve done that, take a look at the four possible scenarios in Figure 16 (opposite). Which one looks most like your drawing? Which seems most plausible? Later, we’ll look at a real tiger (in Figure 21, but resist the urge to skip ahead) where the answer will be revealed.
But remember the grand illusion: even if a tiger, rather alarmingly, was standing immediately in front of you, your eyes and brain would grasp only a sequence of visual fragments: now noticing the orangey colour of its fur, then seeing its great jaws opening in a yawn, then noticing the sheer size of its outstretched paws. Our sense of the vividness of the tiger stems from the fluency with which we can answer any question we wish about the tiger’s appearance – but as we have seen, the information is created on demand, not loaded into our brains in a single visual gulp. In fact, we can’t even load the perception of a simple quartered circle with alternately blue and green segments (Figure 12) into our minds, let alone an object as complex as a tiger.
Just as the visual details of a real tiger would be available on demand, so is the tiger of your imagination – as soon as you ask yourself about the shape of its teeth, the position of its tail, or whether it is longer than the sofa, an answer comes to you, quick as a flash. But this is not because you are making ‘internal eye movements’ across the form of the ‘inner tiger’ to find out how it looks; rather, your mind is improvising the answers, almost as soon as you ask for them. This is our subjective experience of vivid imagery: the ability to question, explore and manipulate your view of the ‘tiger’ at will.
The sense of vividness, of ‘encompassing’ a whole object or an entire scene, comes, whether in imagery or perception, from the ability to maintain the hoax. We don’t ‘load’ vast quantities of information about an object or a scene simultaneously into our memory – but we can have the answer to any question about visual experience available just when we need it. An image is vivid to the extent that, as soon as a query crosses our mind (Are the tiger’s claws retracted? Is its mouth open or closed? What are the precise locations of its front legs? What about the shape and colour of its nose?), the answer is ready to hand. If an actual tiger, or a picture of a tiger, is before us, then these questions can be fluently answered by a flick of our eyes and/or a shift of attention. If instead we are imagining a tiger, our brain needs to answer these questions not by consulting an inner mental picture, but by sketching in retracted or extended claws or by specifying the mouth or the legs in a little more detail.
The crucial clue that mental imagery is fake parallels our discussion of the fictional character of verbal explanations (Chapter 1) and sensory experience (Chapter 2): mental imagery, too, is both sparse and contradictory. For example, our mental image of a tiger, vivid or not, is incredibly sketchy – almost all the details are entirely absent. And our reports of our images are contradictory too, as we’ll see shortly. The sense of vividness of an object, a text or a scene, whether in vision or imagination, doesn’t come from creating a complete and precise ‘inner copy’ – this is just another phantom, another cleverly improvised illusion.
Now let’s try something much simpler than a tiger. I have a wire-frame cube on the desk in front of me (Figure 17). After inspecting it, the following seductive thought occurs to me: surely, in addition to the wire-frame cube in the outer world, the physical object on my desk, there is another cube in my mental inner world – an inner cube, as it were, in my mind’s eye. Indeed, with a bit of mental effort, I can shut my eyes and imagine the cube still there on the desk; the mental ‘inner cube’ remains, it seems, even when its link is severed from the physical ‘outer cube’.
In the case of perception, the inner and outer worlds appear to have been brought into correspondence: the inner cube of my mind’s eye seemed roughly to be a copy of the physical cube on the desk. I say roughly because, for example, there will be details of the physical cube (e.g. discolorations on parts of the frame that are not visible from where I am sitting, and of which I am entirely unaware) which won’t be present in my imagined cube. And the physical cube will be made of particular stuff (the wires may perhaps be made of copper), whereas, of course, the putative ‘mental cube’ is not made of a material substance of any kind. None the less, we have the intuition that the inner ‘mental cube’ is a pretty good copy of the real thing. Moreover, unlike the tiger’s stripes, the cube seems to have rather fewer intricate details to confuse us. We seem to be on safer ground.
Interestingly, the inner cube appears to have a life of its own. Closing my eyes I can see my mental wire-frame cube before me, though admittedly rather indistinctly; and I can imagine this inner cube lifting off from the table and hovering briefly, perhaps, before setting off to my left, spinning elegantly on a vertical axis, performing a lively somersault, and dropping back onto the surface of the desk. So it seems I can explore an inner perceptual world detached from external reality. And aren’t the realms of fiction, fantasy and dreams illustrations of the richness of the inner worlds that our minds can construct?
But let’s cross-examine this viewpoint for a moment.
The Sceptic (S): Tell me, then, can you see the cube vividly in your mind’s eye?
The Inner Explorer (E): Oh yes, very vividly.
S: And tell me, what orientation is the cube, in relation to the desk?
E: Well, that’s easy – one of the faces of the cube is flush with the surface of the desk.
S: And what about shadows?
E: Shadows?
S: Well, in your perfectly vivid image, presumably there is light coming from somewhere – perhaps an Anglepoise lamp lighting the surface of the desk?
E: Oh yes, I suppose there is some sort of light. In fact, now I think about it, the light is directly overhead.
S: So there must be shadows from the frame of the cube onto the surface of the desk.
E: Yes. I suppose they were there all along – I just didn’t pay much attention to them before.
S: Tell me about the shadows. What pattern can you see in your mind’s eye, when you look at those shadows?
E: Umm, well, they are all rectangles and squares, a sort of interlocking grid pattern. I can sort of see it in my mind, but it’s so hard to put into words.
S: [Handing E a pen and paper] Perhaps it would be easier to draw.
E: Thanks, but it is actually quite tricky to draw too.
S: Perhaps I can help. Just imagine the cube balancing on one ‘corner’.
E: Actually, this is not as easy as I would have thought.
S: Well, it hardly seems that this should be necessary for such a simple geometric shape, but perhaps it would help if I show you a picture (Figure 18). It’s cheating, really, but just have a quick glance, and see if that helps you conjure up the cube a bit more vividly in your mind’s eye.
E: OK.
S: Now there are, of course, eight corners on a cube. Let’s leave aside the ‘bottom’ corner (the one it is balancing on) and ‘top’ corner (opposite to the bottom corner). Can you describe the layout of the other six corners? Imagine a horizontal plane, which intersects one of the corners. Does it intersect any of the other corners?
E: Er, well, perhaps all of them – perhaps they all lie on the same plane.
Figure 18. A cube balancing on one corner. The diametrically opposite corner lies directly above the corner on which the cube is balanced – otherwise the cube would topple over. How are the six other corners arranged? Are they all the same height as each other? All at different heights? Or arranged in ‘layers’? These are challenging questions, even with the figure in front of you.3S: Now that’s plain self-contradictory – in fact, it’s just geometrically impossible! Are you sure you’re really looking at a mental copy of a cube in your mind’s eye? (No looking back at Figure 18 now!)
E: OK – well, perhaps each corner is at a different height?
S: But that’s geometrically impossible too.
E: Well, perhaps a plane will intersect two or three corners, then.
S: Yes, three as it happens. In fact, those six corners form two equilateral triangles, one above the other.
E: Oh yes, that sounds right. I think I can see that now – yes, I don’t know what I was thinking before.
S: So if you can see that nice and clearly, you’ll be able to tell me how those triangles relate to each other – you can just see them, can’t you?
S: OK – let’s try something else with the balancing cube. Imagine that the only source of light is coming directly from above: a spotlight high above the point on the desk that the cube is balancing on. Can you see that? You can look back at the Figure 18 now and again, if you really must.
E: Yes: balancing cube, with light above. I can see that.
S: What do the shadows look like now.
E: Er, well, lots of lines at different diagonal angles; a sort of wonky grid [becoming desperate].
S: Do the lines of the shadow criss-cross each other?
E: They might do.
S: Do they make any kind of familiar pattern or shape?
E: Er …
S: [Revealing Figure 19 with a flourish] Does this pattern ring any bells with you?
E: [Blanches and reels back unable to respond]
The claim that one is able to explore, and report on, an inner mental landscape would not stand up in court. Our poor inner explorer E seems to be telling an incredible tale, and one that she is quite literally making up as she goes along. In the real world, wire-frame cubes have shadows, whether one notices them or not; and those shadows have definite shapes, whether one is attending to them or not; and when one’s attention is drawn to those shapes, it is possible to say what they are, at least roughly. In the real world, when those shadows form a simple pinwheel, we can observe this – and report it accurately, probably with a sense of surprise.
How different this is from E’s attempts to report the contents of her inner world! E’s reports are the familiar confection of sparsity and self-contradiction – they seem continually to miss out crucial visual information (e.g. shadows) that surely should be present, but equally to topple easily into downright mathematical contradictions. First off, the wire-frame cube is sitting on a blank desktop; there are no shadows, and no light source to cast them. Most likely, too, the desk has no particular shape or extent; neither desk nor cube has any definite colour; the cube is of no particular size. Once light sources and shadows are mentioned, of course, they can be sketched into our mental picture, but sketched only crudely. We have little idea what the shadows must look like, except that they must surely consist of straight lines, in some sort of slanted, grid-like pattern. Queries about the six corners reveal abject confusion – as Figure 20 shows, there is a simple and unique possible layout, as two equilateral triangles, one above the other. Any other proposal is simply geometrically impossible – yet E is happy to suggest such impossibilities (as most of us are).
We have the intuition that we can imagine the cube moving around, and perhaps a vague sense of the complex of shadows dancing beneath it. But this, too, turns out to be only the lightest of sketches. And the problem is not that the inner world is really there, but that it is difficult to report its flux and complexity, because even when the set-up of cube and lighting generates what should, in the outer world, be a striking, surprising and simple pattern (our pinwheel shadow), the mind’s eye is entirely oblivious to this fact. Again, any other proposal is a mathematical contradiction – yet we cheerfully make such proposals none the less.
In the light of the improvised nature of visual experience, none of this should be surprising: of course our imagery will be partial and contradictory. To believe that we have constructed a ‘picture’ of the outer world in our own minds is to fall for the illusion of mental depth, hook, line and sinker.
THE LOST WORLD
Have we been too hasty? E’s answers don’t entirely make sense. But perhaps S’s line of cross-examination has confused her into giving apparently contradictory responses. Such is the nature of hostile legal interrogation – the most honest witness can get into a terrible muddle.
But this defence won’t work, because, as we’ll see, our attempts to probe our innermost mental depths always get into a muddle, and do so in systematic and predictable ways. Our answers are full of gaps and inconsistencies. But why? Because our imagination, like visual experience, is a narrow window of lucidity, and what we see through that window is invented – creatively, subtly, intelligently – not merely reported from some fully specified, entirely coherent inner world.
Finally, back to the tiger’s stripes, shown on an actual tiger in Figure 21. Most of us guess correctly that the tiger’s stripes run vertically around its body, and most of us have the feeling that the stripes also run around the legs, rather than along their length, but this is perhaps less obvious (so the top left option in Figure 16 is the closest to the truth). But did you notice, by careful inspection of your mental image, that the tiger’s front legs don’t have stripes at all? Or that, for the back legs, the stripes gradually and smoothly ‘rotate’ from horizontal (along the leg) to vertical (along the body). The stripes on the head form a complex pattern that seems all too familiar now that one sees it, but which most of us are utterly unable to discern from our mental images of tigers. Many of us also fail to ‘see’ the white belly and inner legs of the tiger. You should now view your sense of a highly realistic and finely detailed ‘photographic’ image of a tiger cavorting in the inner landscape of your mind with great suspicion.
Yet, on reflection, perhaps these results should not come as a surprise. We have seen that we grasp the visual world one element at a time. The same is true for mental imagery. That is, just as we wonder about the shape of our imaginary tiger’s tail, the shape of a tiger’s tail is immediately traced in our mind’s eye; just as we ask ourselves whether its claws are extended or retracted, our imagination invents an answer to this too. When we speculate about the location of the light source shining on a wire-frame cube, we create such a light source; when asked about the shadows that it casts, we sketch a mental image of shadows (though rather unrealistic ones, as we have seen). We are not examining a fully formed, comprehensively detailed and coloured mental image in our mind’s eye – at one moment zooming in, or shifting our attention to the left and right. We are, instead, creating our mental image, piece by piece, moment by moment, touchpoint by touchpoint.
It is worth thinking, for a moment, about what these observations imply for dreaming. Dreams seem to be naturally viewed as the successive creation and dissolution of momentary fragments; in retrospect full of holes and contradictions, however compelling they may be as we experience them. The incoherence of dreams becomes immediately evident as soon as we attempt to recall them. Scenes and even time itself shifts abruptly, people change identities, and appear and disappear without warning. The ‘world’ of dreams is a fiction, a jumble of fragments and contradictions. Indeed, it is a particularly inchoate fiction: there is no careful author painstakingly attempting to bring the story into some kind of order – merely a succession of capricious imaginative leaps.
Suppose, for example, we imagine meeting an old friend, Ludwig, in a dream. We may have no memory, and typically we do not, of the specific visual details of Ludwig’s clothing, whether he had his glasses on or off, or had recently had a haircut. It is tempting to put down such vagueness to the weakness of memory; and perhaps especially to the rapid dissolution of the memories of our dreams. But this is not the explanation at all. We haven’t forgotten these details; our brain never bothered to specify them in the first place. A plethora of further questions have no meaningful answers in this and almost any other dream encounter – What was the weather like? What sort of floor or ground were we standing on? What year was it? What was the nature and level of background noise? Were any cars or trains audible? Which trees and plants were visible? How many leaves did each tree/plant have, and how were they oriented towards the light?
Dreams are improvised stories, with few details sketched in. When our minds create them, we lock onto some specific fragments of information; almost everything else is left utterly blank. There is no more truth about whether, in my dream, Ludwig was wearing jeans or his familiar tartan trousers than there is truth about the shape of Homer Simpson’s liver, or the petrol consumption of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
PERCEPTION AND IMAGINATION
There is a crucial difference, of course, between the work of perception and that of imagination. In perceiving the outer world, we can check and cross-check by shifting our attention back and forth; and unless we are in the grip of a devious psychological experiment, we can be fairly confident that we will obtain the same answers each time – because the outer world consists of pre-formed stable objects which we can inspect from various directions with a fair expectation that these different views will fit together. But when we consult our imagination, we can have no such assurance. The products of our minds will be as inconsistent as Oscar Reutersvärd’s figures – and this should not be surprising. Even the most assiduous novelist has terrible trouble avoiding self-contradiction; even with the aid of notes on each character’s back-story, invented maps and imagined family trees, still the inconsistencies creep in. But our momentary flow of improvised words and images is, of course, far more prone to confusion and self-contradiction.
Our shape-shifting ‘mental image’ of the wire-frame cube should also make us sceptical about inner worlds of all kinds. If we invent answers about the rotating cubes as we go along, perhaps the same applies to the inner world of motives and beliefs. Indeed, our storytelling about human motives and beliefs is at least as incoherent as our descriptions of the cube in our mind’s eye; and here, too, the incoherence arises not because it is difficult to peer into and report back on our murky hidden mental depths, but because there are no hidden mental depths.
Many of us have found ourselves wondering whether we dream in colour. But dreams no more have colours than stories do. And they no more have colours than they have textures, background noises, odours or arrangements of lighting. We can have the sense of a rich and colourful dream-world, of course, because we can create sensory impressions as soon as we start wondering about them – perceptual touchpoints with our dreams are imagined, one by one. But if while we are dreaming we happen not to wonder about the colour of Ludwig’s trousers, then the colour of his trousers is blank. To suspect that Ludwig’s trousers may have had a colour, but we simply didn’t notice it, would be as misguided as imagining that Ophelia wore sapphire earrings, bought from a particular jeweller in Copenhagen, in a specific year, even though none of this ever crossed Shakespeare’s mind. It would, in short, be to confuse reality (where there are any number of facts, whether we know them or not) and fiction (where, roughly, there are no facts, beyond those that the author has set down).
The same confusion – between reality and fiction – arises when we wonder whether there are unheard sounds, unfelt pains, hidden motives or unconscious beliefs. These shadowy entities are no more real than the colour of Ludwig’s trousers or the pattern of shadows projected by my supposed ‘mental cube’. The inconsistent, sketchy flow of thought is not a projection of a rich and deep inner mental world. Our thoughts are not shadows of an alternative inner reality, to be charted and discovered; they are fictions of our own devising, created moment by moment.
THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF HERBERT GRAF
When the celebrated Austrian opera director Herbert Graf (1903–73) was just four years old, he witnessed a frightening event while walking with his mother. A horse, one of a pair pulling a large van through the streets of Vienna, fell and starting kicking out wildly. Herbert feared that it might be dying. This frightening incident left its mark on the sensitive child, and he expressed his fear that other horses might fall down. As a result he became afraid of the sight of horses and horse-drawn carriages (particularly large carriages, such as the one involved in the terrible incident). He also developed a more general fear of horses: not just that they would fall, but that they might bite him. Herbert explained that he was especially alarmed ‘by what horses wear in front of their eyes and the black round their mouths’,4 presumably referring to the blinkers and the muzzles used by the type of working horse that he had seen fall. This fear extended into an anxiety about going out onto the streets of Vienna, with its profusion of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. These fears were severe enough to cause his parents considerable, and understandable, concern.
Why did Herbert begin to fear that horses might bite, something that he had never seen as far as we know? A natural speculation would be that the initial terrifying incident led him to feel high levels of anxiety in the presence of horses, with the associated physical symptoms – pulse racing, breath short, adrenaline coursing through him. And this has a natural interpretation: that he is afraid of horses. But the brain then needs to explain why it is afraid of horses – what harm might a horse do to a young child that would justify such a fear? A natural explanation (among other possibilities, of course) would be that the horse might bite.
Thankfully Herbert’s fear of horses gradually lifted – indeed, this is quite a normal pattern with childhood phobias – though some, of course, persist. Perhaps the terrible sight and sounds of the flailing horse began to fade from memory; perhaps they were gradually overlaid by more innocuous thoughts about, and experiences of, horses.
The human ability to project imaginative and exotic stories onto relatively prosaic behaviour was beautifully illustrated by the response of Herbert’s father, Max Graf, a noted music critic, to his son’s fears. Immersed at the time in popular contemporary theories of infantile sexuality, Max Graf wrote to a local doctor in Vienna that he suspected that ‘the ground [for the phobia] was prepared by sexual over-excitation due to his mother’s tenderness’ and that the specific fear of horses ‘seems somehow to be connected with his having been frightened by a large penis’.5 The doctor agreed, concluding that ‘[Herbert] really was a little Oedipus who wanted to have his father “out of the way”, to get rid of him, so that he might be alone with his beautiful mother and sleep with her.’6 According to this perspective, Herbert was therefore afraid of his father, as a powerful rival for his mother’s affection.
Herbert’s father and the doctor began to suspect, indeed, that Herbert’s fear of horses was really a fear of his father, suggesting that Herbert’s particular fear of ‘what horses wear in front of their eyes and the black round their mouths’ might actually be a fear of his father’s glasses and moustache, rather than referring to the blinkers and muzzle of the horse that fell so terrifyingly. The doctor wrote that Herbert’s fear of leaving the house had, moreover, a hidden motive: ‘The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its purpose … allowing him to stay at home with his beloved mother.’7 This doesn’t quite hang together, even in its own terms: Herbert is not reported as having been anxious about his mother’s absence (his mother leaving the home, while he remained), and he was equally afraid of being outside even when his mother was present. Herbert thus seemed to be afraid of leaving the house, rather than being parted from his mother – which would make sense if he was afraid of a repetition of the dreadful incident of the fallen horse, of course. Max Graf and the doctor were sceptical – indeed, they felt it would hardly be surprising if Herbert were to hide the true origins of his phobia, even from himself. They concluded that, while the phobia started immediately after the traumatic incident, this was merely a trigger for the phenomenon, which was assumed to have rich subconscious roots. Herbert disagreed: ‘No. I only got it then. When the horse in the bus fell down. It gave me such a fright, really! That was when I got the nonsense [Herbert’s name for his phobia].’
It is easy, of course, to find fanciful uses for Freudian theory to create highly elaborate and ‘deep’ explanations of behaviour that seems to have an all-too-obvious ‘shallow’ interpretation: to see a fear of horses as arising not from a frightening experience with one, but from a desire to kill one’s father and sleep with one’s mother. Herbert’s father was a purely amateur psychoanalyst; and the doctor based his advice on the father’s letters, and just one brief interview with the boy.
Yet this particular case deserves special attention, because Herbert Graf, future luminary of world opera, was known as ‘Little Hans’; the local doctor, as you may have guessed, was Sigmund Freud himself; this case study (1909), for all its frailties, is one of the most important in the canon of psychoanalysis. Indeed, so celebrated did this case study become that, at the time of writing, the discussion of this relatively brief childhood phobia takes up nearly half of Herbert Graf’s Wikipedia entry, given equal weight with his nearly half-century as a leading figure in the world of opera.
Max Graf and Freud were attempting to peer into the dark recesses of the mind of ‘Little Hans’; later analysts have also gone over the case, producing different diagnoses. The problem with these disputes is not that they disagree about Herbert’s subconscious inner mental world, but that Herbert/Hans – like the rest of us – has no inner world, just a collection of mental fragments. Asking whether Hans desired, subconsciously, to kill his father and sleep with his mother is not only wrong in detail. It is no more meaningful than wondering how many stripes William Blake’s Tyger had, whether Tom Sawyer had been born on a Tuesday, or whether James Bond’s lifetime grand total intake of Martinis came to a prime number. Our imaginations can fill in these details and more – but the product of our imaginations is, of course, fiction not fact.
Putting the point as starkly as possible: Graf and Freud’s mistake was to confuse literary creation with psychology. They were able to invent a story about Herbert/Hans and his phobia; and they could equally easily have invented a variety of alternative stories. The key question for the creative writer is: which is the most interesting, striking and engaging story. Indeed, Freud’s case notes show that he was an endlessly inventive and fascinating storyteller, drawing on a great knowledge of mythology and the arts to create intriguing new perspectives on human experience. But there is no fact of the matter regarding whether one or another of these stories is true. In short, while Graf and Freud believed psychology should be science, they practised it as a literary art form.
So much for the flimsiness of mental images and dreams. But does the story stop there? Most of us have a sense that our minds are teeming with thoughts. We may feel rather unsure exactly about the nature of the inhabitants of our ‘inner world’, but plausible candidates would seem to be beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, mental images, logical arguments, justifications, feelings of anxiety, delight, excitement, gloom, contentment, resignation or enthusiasm, flashes of anger or surges of empathy. Our vagueness about quite what our minds contain is by no means accidental – the solidity of our mental furniture is liable to dissolve as soon as we reach out and touch it.