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Imagination, making for ourselves both true and false metaphors and threading them together in both conscious and unconscious narrative, clearly plays a much more important and central role in the way we think and speak and order our worlds than we are inclined to think. Again and again, the ways in which we imagine our life and its possibilities can affect us right down to the level of the cells from which our bodies are built. And again and again, insight into the ways that life can be and can change arrive wearing metaphorical costumes.

This happens not only in sleep and dreams but also in so-called waking states, since at any time of genuine learning we focus inwards, in a state of narrowed attention, which we can call trance. One cannot really learn anything without going into a kind of trance. When one has taken in a really important and vital idea that has a fundamental effect on a deep level, one might find oneself staring for a long time at a crack in a wall or a vista or a space in the sky and tracing the shape of that learning over again.

Stories we hear, tell and experience show us ourselves. It’s difficult, is it not, to get properly involved in a novel if you can’t identify, even if only partially, with any of the characters? Have you ever tried to watch a film in which you hated and were alienated by every single actor? But, in very important ways, all of us put together a kind of narrative about who we are, the kinds of things we do and like, the capacities we have, the way our pasts have been and our futures will be. It is becoming better accepted in psychotherapy – partly through the trail-blazing work of American psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Milton Erickson and his successors – that it’s often the unnecessarily limiting stories and personal metaphors individuals tell themselves that need to be challenged, so that they can progress in dealing with a concern.