“The mind that provides me with significant insight is often not precisely my own. The experience is like having a brief, waking dream, in which a set of comparisons and relationships are vaguely and creatively linked. The problem is, this mental figure is so volatile (more than dreams) that it will not stay still or static long enough to be retrieved fully into the verbal mind. So what I have to do is grab the thread that represents the core of the thing, and try to drag that into the domain of -memory- which is an entirely different world from that in which it was developed. The result is -usually- forgetting. I feel I had something profoundly insightful at hand, and can no longer retrieve it. Occasionally, however, my long practice pays off, and I can bring a goodly portion of the treasure ‘across the divide’ into consciousness, where, once I can hold the figure there with some stability, I can attempt to translate it (usually using metaphor or a story) into something that people who are not in the world of insight can both understand, and recognize from within themselves.”

— an anonymous insight retrieval technician