“One of the best analogies of the limitations of our usual habits of thought is that of a bird that is walking. The bird has domains of liberty in movement we would never suspect if we never saw one flying, and the aspect of our mind that ‘thinks’ conceptually is like this.

Our exposure to language, comparison, and evaluative thought in early childhood effectively changes what was born to be a bird into something more like a snail.

The key is the role of imagination, and our culturally-imposed denigration of this aspect of our minds which has more than five kinds of wings… and endows us with the capacity for the analog of flight in domains we are not even aware exist.

Consider the example of dreaming, where the mind literally creates an entire universe for the sake of exploring astonishing aspects of possibility, identity, roles, and circumstances that we would be incapable of ‘thinking’ of at all… and which are so unusual that we can only ‘remember’ their skeleton… which we call ‘a plot’…”

— an anonymous informant