Imagination and fact. One memory of an event is never the same as another persons memory of the same event. Who’s right? In truth and without moral judgement both are. It is through a moral framework that fact is seen above fiction but it is through a spiritual and humane framework that what we deem fiction is at least equal to fact. Am I right in this? I mean look at religions and ask what is imagination and what is fact and you will see how it is not as simple as it seems. Faith allows for imagination to become fact. Faith allows fact and imagination to weld together as truth.

Faith drives through the heart of society and much of it is based on books that use imagination to tell a story. There’s fighting over those facts, wars even where faith leads imagination to uncontestable fact. What if you removed the obstacle of faith and believed in imagination as real, for real? The dictionary definition of imagination is “the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses”

Which senses does this definition speak of. Have we only five? What is a sixth sense but a truth revealed regardless of “fact”? What if Imagination was in and of itself a sense – truth. In lieu of this we collect evidence to build our cases – our personalities our faiths, our structures, legal positions, our insurances and assurances – until they become unbending formidable fortresses of fact.

But is there more to be said, more to be discovered, more enlightenment to be found, more truth to be told, more clarity, more honesty, more humility and humanity in the matrix of imagination. is it a great mistake by society whcih defines itself via books and religion to believe that imagination is not a central facet of reality?

The living example is Jean Dominique Bauby once the editor of french fashion magazine Elle. On 8 December 1995 at the age of 43, Bauby suffered a massive stroke. When he woke up twenty days later, he found he was entirely speechless; he could only blink his left eyelid. From his bed he wrote the breathtaking book The Dvinig Bell and The Butterfly by blinking each letter of each word. “apart from my eye” he said “the only part of me that can move is my imagination”.