dreaming my own dream

Peter Doig, White Canoe, 1991

I’ve been really enjoying Psychomagic by Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s similar to Impro by Keith Johnstone, another cult-favorite book about how our expectations and emotional orientation shape reality. It describes a phenomenon I still struggle to articulate, which is that my life completely changed when my emotional experience of it did. I’ve had a more distinct transition than most, since I was so affected by psychedelics. Afterwards I started noticing how much my reality changed—my relationships were different, the way people treated me was different, my work life was different. This sounds like common sense—if you’re changed internally, you behave different externally—but I think most people who haven’t experienced it would underestimate the scale of the change. Put it this way: reality is far more malleable than I thought it was. From Psychomagic:

The lucid dream taught me to move within a subtle reality, where all the mutations, all the transformations can serve at every moment. That depends entirely on my intention. In the lucid dream, the single intention of finding myself in Africa among a herd of elephants transported me there. In this other dream mode—which is “reality”—it is also my brain, the representation that I make in the world, which controls the game. “Reality” does not exist in itself, instant after instant. I create my reality, happy or nightmarish, monotone or passionate.