Imagination, creation and literary origins: dreaming and waking

Quotation, allusion, mediumship and speaking with or through others’ voices is an established ad well-worked aspect of culture, indeed, it seems, across all cultures, an appropriate subject indeed for COMPASIO. So too has the inspiration artists have drawn for their creation from dreams and the voices of a world beyond themselves. This has been relatively well studied in such fields as visual art and music. Less attention, however, despite its clear centrality, has been given to literary creation. This paper, by a cultural anthropologist, uses a personal case study to illustrate how this can work through the interaction between dreams and narrative. The case here, though only singular in its detailed content and process has wider implications for the comparative anthropological and comparative study of culture, individuality, imagination and creativity.