How to Use Your Imagination to Create: 4 Powerful Ways

OVERVIEW: This guide explores the nature of the imagination and how anyone can access their imagination and use it to create.

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What really is the imagination?

Where do new ideas come from?

How do you use your imagination in your own life and work?

And are there ways to improve our imagination?

Today, we’re going to address all of these questions and more.

Let’s dive in …

CONTENTS

What is the Imagination?

In a basic sense, imagination is our innate ability to form creative images or pictures in our minds.

Someone with a “vivid imagination” can create clear and creative (novel) pictures in their minds.

Imagination, then, has two concepts:

The capacity to conceive novel ideas
The ability to translate those novel ideas into pictures and mental images

The imagination plays a vital role in psychological development, creativity, product innovations, and in the culture and society at large.

A Cultural Bias Against the Imagination

Albert Einstein said in a 1929 interview:¹

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

It has become a famous quote, but do you think he was correct?

Einstein was voicing the value he placed on the imagination concerning scientific research, an area traditionally (and currently) dominated by pure rationalism.

How about in your professional work? Do you value imagination more than (or as much as) what you know?

It’s unlikely. We tend to favor knowledge over imagination, and reason over intuition.

Let’s call it a cultural bias. We might suspect this particular bias has existed since the Age of the Enlightenment (1700s).

What is the Source of the Imagination?

Roughly fifteen years ago, I went on a five-year, in-depth intellectual odyssey to uncover the source of creativity.

I studied the works of many creativity researchers and read everything I could find from creative geniuses who describe their processes.

When we understand the source of creativity, I believe, we are better positioned to access it more freely.

When Einstein says “knowledge,” he’s referring to our conscious, rational minds. It is from the conscious mind that we predominantly operate each day.

We mainly use our intellect and reasoning faculties to evaluate our surroundings, make decisions, and communicate with one another.

Cognitive sciences, however, continue to reveal that most of our behavior, attitudes, and decisions are influenced, if not ruled, by unconscious processes.²

What is the Unconscious?

Think of the unconscious as everything about ourselves that we don’t know.

This unconscious—often mistakenly referred to as the unconscious mind—is a storehouse of every memory, image, thought, feeling, and experience we’ve ever had, but it’s even more vast than that.³

Psychiatrist Carl Jung differentiated between the personal unconscious and the collective conscious. The personal unconscious is what I just defined above: it’s a storehouse of our personal memories and experiences.

The collective unconscious is a storehouse of images, thoughts, feelings, memories, behavioral patterns, and experiences of all humanity throughout time.⁴

To Jung, these universal images, symbols, and behavioral patterns are called archetypes. These archetypes appear to be a part of our cultural and biological inheritance.

And it is deep in the recesses of this collective unconscious that we find a wellspring of creativity—the source of our imagination.

It’s as if, deep inside each of us, untold hidden treasures, insights, and ideas are just waiting for us to discover.

Your Inner Guide to the Imagination

Living strictly conscious lives, many of us rarely tap into our innate imaginative capacities. Those who drink from this internal wellspring, however, we often call artists.

Ancient traditions and modern integrative therapies suggest there’s a mediating factor that enables our conscious mind (often called the ego) to access, communicate, and even befriend the forces of the unconscious.

The Egyptians called it the Ba-Soul. Ancient Greeks (including Socrates) called this guide the inner daimon. The Romans saw it as a genius in everyone.

Western religions sometimes refer to it as our guardian angel or soul.

In Taoism, it is the Original Spirit. Other Eastern philosophies as well as Jungian and other transpersonal psychologies call it the Self (capital “S”).

Many artists call it the Muse. For Mozart, it was his Divine Maker; for William Blake, Poetic Genius.

By whatever name, we tap into this Inner Guide when our imagination flows.

The “Language” of the Unconscious

Just as our conscious mind provides us with a constant stream of thought, our unconscious is perpetually trying to express itself in its own way.

Only, we haven’t learned how to give it attention, listen and relate to it, or understand it.

Using our conscious mind, humans communicate with one another through language, logic, and reason. Language is the workings of the rational mind (or cerebral cortex).

The difficulty in approaching the unconscious is that it doesn’t communicate with words. It expresses itself via images, symbols, and feelings.

Only a few have learned to interpret these images and symbols that come to us in dreams, fantasies, and visions.

Accessing and paying attention to these images is the first step; learning to interpret and translate them is the second.

The Return of the Dreamer

To balance out our bias toward rationalism, we can create space for the imagination.

Disney, when it was still a creative powerhouse, used a method for producing creative work that anyone could borrow.

They differentiate three roles necessary for generating creative ideas and actualizing them:

The Dreamer,
The Realist, and
The Critic.

The Dreamer accesses the unconscious by allowing the mind to wander without bounds. Daydreaming isn’t just allowed; it’s encouraged.

The Realist accesses the conscious mind that organizes ideas, develops plans, and sets forth strategies for execution.

The Critic tests the plan, plays the role of Devil’s Advocate, and looks out for what could go wrong.

These three roles represent three different archetypal patterns. By acknowledging the Dreamer as one of the three parts of the creative process, we begin to give this archetype more.

How to Use Your Imagination with Child-Like Wonder

While imagination comes easily and naturally for most young children, this isn’t the case for most adults.

Imagination is one of the innate qualities—like genius—that gets conditioned out of us as we get older. Seriousness replaces playfulness. Worries replace periods of reverie.

Over time, repress more and more negative emotions that get stored up in our bodies. Anxieties and internal tensions become the new normal.

Yet, the gateway to the unconscious is the body itself.

Using Your Imagination Starts with the Body

As such, relaxing the body is an untold secret to tapping into your imagination.

Start by taking a few slow, steady, deep breaths. Breathe into the bottom of your belly and exhale, allowing an imaginary balloon in your belly to deflate. (See, we’re already using our imagination.)

Closing your eyes can help, as it encourages you to use your mind’s eye instead of your external vision. Let go trying to control what might happen next.

As your body relaxes, you can feel the energy, lightness, and spaciousness all around you.

From here, you’re free to travel and explore your inner world. Even if you haven’t visited this realm in a while, it may still feel familiar.

You often frequented this inner world in your early years before so-called adults and the education system itself severed your connection to it.⁵

But it was always right there, waiting for your return.

The Harold Method to Using Your Imagination

You might start with a blank canvas, like Harold and the Purple Crayon, and begin to draw.

Do you remember Harold from Crockett Johnson’s children’s classic, Harold and the Purple Crayon?

A young boy goes for a walk one night, creating his environment as he sees fit.

His instrument for creating his world is a purple crayon. His world is a blank page until he draws it.

Harold goes for a walk at night, so he draws the moon for light and a straight path so he won’t get lost.

Eventually, he draws an apple tree.

When You Fall into the Ocean …

Harold creates a monster to protect his apple tree, but the monster he imagines scares him.

With his purple crayon in his trembling hand, he accidentally creates an ocean and falls in.

The ocean has long been a symbol of the unconscious—the great mystery beneath our conscious awareness.

How easy it is to slip into that great abyss. How often do we create difficult situations for ourselves because of persistent thoughts and emotions, or because we stop paying attention?

Harold symbolizes our playful, innocent, and spontaneous capacities—the instinctive, creative drive welling up within each of us.

Harold doesn’t complain about his predicament. He doesn’t lament:

How come I always fall into the damn ocean?
Why does bad stuff always happen to me?

He doesn’t blame others. “Who put this ocean here in the first place?”

Harold doesn’t wallow in misery, asking God why life is so difficult. Nor does he give up and drown.

No, he draws a boat, climbs in, and sets sail.

Create a Space for Openness and Creativity

Keeping that playful, creative principle alive in adulthood isn’t easy. I have gone through long periods of my life where I wondered if I had permanently lost my purple crayon, or if my inner Harold was in a coma.

But it is in our darkest hours we must call upon Harold. We must provide a white space for him to create.

This white space often means letting go of our current viewpoints and beliefs about how things should be. As adults, we have a lot of those “shoulds,” don’t we?

Allowing space to draw sometimes means adopting a new orientation towards your projects, your work, your life, or yourself.

Zen Buddhism has a term for this white space. They call it a beginner’s mind.

Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes:⁶

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

That is, an empty mind creates a blank canvas for your imagination to paint new pictures. Then, it can guide you to distant shores filled with endless possibilities, richness, and meaning.

Common Barriers to Using Your Imagination

Are you sensing the untapped potential within you now?

This wellspring of the imagination is available to all of us, yet few drink freely from its source. Why?

From an early age, we are conditioned to get in our own way.

Interestingly, most of the same ways we hijack personal mastery apply to how we block our imaginative faculties.

We:

Move too fast.
Think obsessively.
Hold onto limiting beliefs.
Listen to the inner critic.
Deplete our energy reserves on distractions.

All of these activities produce physical and mental tension. As we said above, relaxation is a precursor to returning to the imagination.

Humanistic psychologists Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers both highlight this in their studies on creativity. They found that creativity tends to flourish in individuals and cultures that are psychologically safe—the absence of which creates fear and physical tension.

4 Ways to Enhance Your Ability to Use Your Imagination

There are many things you can do to enhance your connection to the imagination including:

Improve the Quality and Duration of Sleep

Remember: the gateway to the unconscious is through your physical body. The body loves to sleep—especially when it needs to recharge and rejuvenate. Sadly, most modern humans are sleep-deprived.

Even when they do sleep, it’s not restorative. Instead, we are bombarded with electromagnetic radiation (EMF) from WIFI, “smart” devices, and everything else the modern world naively calls “progress.” Removing all of that technology from your sleeping environment is prudent. You can also ground your bed to reduce the effects of EMF.

Sleep for longer and take more naps. (For more tips on how to improve the quality of your sleep, check out this guide on how to block blue light and restore your circadian rhythm. Also, consider sleeping on earthing sheets to ground yourself at night.)

Take an Interest in Your Dreams

Jung saw dreams as the bridge to the unconscious. The unconscious uses the imagery of your dreams to communicate with your conscious mind.

You don’t have to decode and interrupt all of these images to benefit from your dreams. Just allow these images to stay in your mind upon awakening. Be curious about these images. Capture some of these dreams and images in a journal.

This practice is deceptively powerful.

Embrace the Imaginative Wanderer

The Wanderer is an archetype—one of the four I highlight in this guide on the creative process.

Slow down. Spend time alone. Take long walks in nature. Allow yourself to enter a state of reverie, letting your consciousness drift. Laziness can be your friend here.

How can we access and use our imagination if we’re constantly exerting ourselves and trying to “achieve” all the time? Step back and reflect instead.

Relax Your Body

Ultimately, as we addressed above, learning to relax is essential to use your imagination more easily.

I offer a variety of guides with practices that get results including:

I also offer a program designed to help you relax your body and reset your mind called The Mastery Method.

Try different things until you discover what works for you.

How to Use Your Imagination to Create

The more attention you give to your imagination, the more accessible it becomes. Using your imagination to create requires you to develop a kind of “muscle” or skill.

One way to experiment is to ask your imagination for aid in solving a problem before you go to sleep. This technique is called making “requests” to your subconscious.

Request assistance as you’re drifting off to sleep and upon awakening, be still. Tune in and listen. Recall your dreams. Without mental editing, capture whatever ideas and images arise.

Another thing you can do to use your imagination to create is to stop at random times during the day and allow your mind to drift. Essentially, daydream on purpose.

“Trying” to use your imagination will work against you as trying creates tension. Instead, be playful and tinker with it, adopting the mindset of a curious explorer.

Using Your Imagination to Envision Your Future Self

If you’re an entrepreneur, can you see the untapped potential the imagination holds for you?

Can you envision new and better ways of building your future and serving your customers?

Your Inner Guide can. Trust that this is true; look and listen within.

Imagination fuels all grand visions. All visionary leaders envision a future that doesn’t yet exist. Steve Jobs, for example, never saw Apple as a business that sells computers. In his imagination, Apple made products that unleashed people’s creativity.

Never underestimate the power of your imagination. It can restore balance and fuel the creation of something that will have a positive impact on you, those around you, and potentially, humanity.

How to Use Your Imagination to Create Your Reality, Solve Problems & Produce Creative Work