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Dreaming a Bridge Between Two Worlds

The ancient Greeks knew writers entered a real, imaginal realm when they wrote and that they encountered the mythic there. They knew there was something more than the merely human involved. Writers, artists of all kinds, enter a particular kind of dreaming state as they create and something from out there, from some other place, comes into and through them. Writers inhabit an older world, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that their dreaming is a bridge between two worlds, or perhaps even that their dreaming allows them access to an ancient, imaginal realm filled with myth and that their writing is an account of what they find there—perhaps it is all three. Writers begin in this normal everyday world in which we live when we think we are awake, and they move, as a way of life, into another, one that is, as Homer intimately understood, filled with powers all of us have been told no longer exist.

Stephen Harrod Buhner
Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life

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