ABSTRACT
The strange world you are about to enter, ®lled with alien perspectives and ancient recurrences, is also the most common world of all. It is a world of many selves in constant states of interaction. Some selves are physical, such as the population of our waking worlds; other selves, like the ®gures we meet in dreams, appear physical, but are fundamentally unknown. The latter exist in a world where imagination takes on body. Theirs is the realm we shall address in this book: the embodied imagination. These appearances present themselves as ``other,'' as having a subjective existence different from our own. Some cultural settings tell us that these dreamed beings are sub-personalities and are therefore integral parts of us, others say that they are ancestors, or spirits from a metaphysical realm, while yet others understand them to be garbled memories randomly downloaded by a delirious brain. None of these statements ± psychological, spiritual, or positivistic scienti®c ± have anything to do with the phenomena they purport to describe, but only repeat their own culturally established self-understanding. While meeting ®gures in embodied imagination, as in, for example, a dream, they present themselves as real. We viscerally know we are meeting other selves. Any notion beyond this meeting with otherness is a culture-speci®c afterthought, not stemming from the encountered phenomena.
