Imaginal Pattern Studies

Creative prompts that give imagination somewhere unfamiliar to go, and ways of looking closely at what you make there.

What the studies are

Imaginal Pattern Studies is an invitation to use your imagination and explore beyond what is familiar to you. Creative prompts give you situations to enter, with enough left unknown for you to discover what happens as you respond. You might encounter someone you would usually avoid, try a role you have never considered, or imagine doing the opposite of what you normally do. Some exercises ask you to follow your response and see where it leads. Others encourage you to try a possibility you might ordinarily rule out.

I am interested in what happens when we give ourselves that permission. What is it like to imagine wanting something we would usually dismiss, or to let ourselves act in a way that feels unlike us? What becomes easier, more difficult, or unexpectedly appealing as we continue?

Afterward, you return to what you made and your experience of making it. You look at where your attention went, what you assumed, how your feelings changed, and what you wanted to revise or leave unexplored. An unfamiliar response can offer as much to consider as a familiar one, including your reaction to having imagined it. Across several studies, you begin to see how you move within different situations and what changes when you try another way. Those observations give you questions to bring back to your life, about how you respond now and the possibilities you might want to explore further.

The full Imaginal Pattern Studies essay and method will be available to download here.

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How a study works

A situation with conditions

A prompt supplies a particular room, a limit on how much time the people have together, or a person who has said something you cannot make them unsay. Some part of the scene remains unknown, so your imagination has to contribute.
Your own response

Now, you'll write what happens in the scene, or draw how you feel, or arrange objects, or speak it aloud into your phone.
Looking before explaining

Observational questions bring attention back to what happened first (a feeling, a scream, a hesitation), what changed and what you added. You sit in the observation and study each response and then a group of your responses. What do you notice? What do you not want to admit?

Workbooks

Each workbook follows one subject through a sequence of studies, with space to write and questions for looking at what you made.

Sepia photograph of a bearded knight in chain mail resting his face against the head of a young woman with long hair, her eyes closed — Julia Margaret Cameron, The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Workbook, ten studies

The Invented Person

What happens when the person we are drawn to becomes someone we have, in part, invented? There may be a real relationship, with affection and a history neither person could have made alone, or there may have been one conversation followed by months of imagining what another would be like.

These studies use creative prompts to make some of our additions available to observe. You begin with a stranger and very little information, then spend time with someone you have already imagined at length. Alongside the imaginative writing, you keep a separate record of what you know from actual contact.

There is room here for the affection that was real and for the future that never became shared. Looking more carefully does not require you to become contemptuous of either person.

Workbook PDF coming soon

The studies

The belongings
The unfinished message
The person you carry
The return
A coincidence
Their ordinary Tuesday
Three years later
The conversation
The object you would return
The life you placed beside them

From the workbook

Study 1: The belongings

You are sitting at a shared table in a quiet place. Someone has left a book with a cracked spine, a set of keys with a small blue keychain, an unfinished postcard and a single earring. You have not read the postcard. The person looking after the room tells you that the owner will return in about ten minutes. You have never met them.

Write for 3 minutes. What do you when you are alone with the belongings?

Let the owner return and find you there. Describe who appears and what happens between you.

Give yourself about 5 minutes to write what happens. Afterward, read the scene. Don't correct mis-spellings or word choices. Begin asking yourself questions like these:

How did you feel beside the objects before there was anyone to respond to? Which one held your attention?
Who did their owner become? Which object seemed to justify that addition, and what else could the same object have suggested?
Who were you in relation to this person when they arrived? Find the moment that gave you that position.

Engraving of a hot-air balloon drifting above clouds at night under a half moon

Further workbooks in preparation

New workbooks will be added here as they’re ready. Ask to be notified.

Reading behind these ideas

C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, volume 8, paragraphs 400 and 401. Jung describes developing an image through imaginative activity in several expressive forms. Read the excerpt
James Hillman, An Inquiry into Image, Spring, 1977. His attention to an image in its particular context informs the discussion of looking before assigning symbolic meanings. Read the essay
Yoram Kaufmann, The Way of the Image: The Orientational Approach to the Psyche, Zahav Books, 2009. A point of reference for considering images and orientation. Publisher information
Emily A. Holmes and Andrew Mathews, Mental imagery and emotion: A special relationship?, Emotion, volume 5, issue 4, 2005, pages 489–497. This experimental study examines imagery and anxiety. Study and abstract

Engraving of a midnight sky over a church and river, with the moon, stars and a comet

Guided Self-Inqury in Small groups

The exercises also provide starting points for workshops and small group work. If you’d like to explore a class with others, I’d be glad to hear from you.

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