Lately, fully into the process of writing again – the sequel to my first novel – I sometimes wake up with phrases. Yesterday it was: Outsight is the dream, insight is reality. Aha, not just a nice wordplay, I thought, but a fitting indication for what happens in the creative, intuitive process. Insight is new comprehension, often through a shift of focus revealing deeper layers, new connections in the matrix that awaken and surprise, fresh meaning, and adjust the outsight, the old noise caught in a time warp. It’s like having new sight through what the Celts called Thin Places, actual or virtual, where our senses are transcended and spheres intermingle.
If you are a creative person, you may listen to the system talking to itself, as it does day and night, even during dreams. Some of us like to branch into the unknown for dimensions beneath surface impressions, probe into the vast reservoir of the personal and collective psyche, normally filtered out from our conscious awareness when we must attend to the practical matters of daily living.
Often a creative process is sparked by sensing in-betweens. This applies to all arts, including writing. Different layers of experience and association diverge and merge anew when we de-focus. In a visual sense, for example, try looking at a tree in twilight, squeeze your eyes and concentrate on the in-between spaces. There is a moment when the shapes reverse and the background becomes the foreground. And who hasn’t looked at clouds or landscapes in a particular light and seen magical beings?
In this optical illusion you only need to tilt your head. 
And there is the meandering mind, receptive to intuition. Like yesterday I popped to the corner shop to get a paper. An unintended detour got me talking to Annie, who does house clearances. Amongst her cornucopia of stuff a spot of bright magenta caught my eye. I instantly thought of my friend, Rahima, presently in hospital. She is a painter. She loves colours. The vibrant patch of silk, I thought, will make her smile. 
Artists tend to tune out of fashion, out of mass projections, to let the muse take them along random paths into deeper strata of perception and cognition – of shapes, colours, sounds and movements – to re-arrange personal experience, bringing them into a new, universal context.
A good example of this process is shown in a documentary of the painter Howard Hodgkin by Alan Yentob, from the IMAGINE series.
Howard Hodgkin has a current exhibition at the Alan Christea Gallery, London. http://www.alancristea.com/ in celebration of his 80th birthday,
A Robert Frost poem – Acquainted with the night – was chosen as the title for the exhibition.
De-focussing is magical – it brings new layers of perception …
‘Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.’ – Howard Thurman
Course of Mirrors 
… the wonderful visit …
I loathe most talk of angels since they became best-selling brands, but the synchronicity of Annie Lennox wearing wings and singing to an angel at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and the discovery of a rare book among my shelves, brought angels up close.
H G Wells (1866-1946) has been referred to as the Father of Science Fiction. A neglected story, The Wonderful Visit, published shortly after The Time Machine, was regarded as a mocking reflection on attitudes, beliefs and the social structure of a typical English village in Victorian times. I read the social commentary as ornamentation, the comical human attempt to stay the same, round a more essential theme, the conflict that can accompany awakening.
The edition below is from 1922 and has an illustration by Conrad Heighton Leigh. The line under it is from chapter 5 – ‘He fired out of pure surprise and habit.’
A strange bird was sighted.
Ornithology being a passion of the Vicar of Siddermorton, Rev. K. Hilyer, he was going to outdo his rivals and hunt the strange bird. So it came to be that on the 4th of August 1895 he shot down an angel.
… He saw what it was, his heart was in his mouth, and he fired out of pure surprise and habit. There was a scream of superhuman agony, the wings beat the air twice, and the victim came slanting swiftly downward and struck the ground – a struggling heap of writhing body, broken wing and flying blood-stained plumes … the Vicar stood aghast, with his smoking gun in his hand. It was no bird at all, but a youth with an extremely beautiful face, clad in a robe of saffron and with iridescent wings … never had the Vicar seen such gorgeous floods of colour …
‘A man,’ said the Angel, clasping his forehead … ‘then I was not deceived, I am indeed in the Land of Dreams.’ The vicar tells him that men are real and angels are myth … ‘It almost makes one think that in some odd way there must be two worlds as it were …’
‘At least two,’ said the Vicar, and goes on pondering … he loved geometrical speculations, ‘there may be any number of three dimensional universes packed side by side, and all dimly aware of each other.’
They met half way, where reality is loosely defined, and truth has no hold. And they shared the nature of their worlds. Eat, pain, and die were among the new terms the strange visitor had to come to grips with.
‘Pain is the warp and the waft of this life,’ said the Vicar. Riddled with remorse over having maimed the Angel’s wing he decides to looks after him. But to adjust to the Vicar’s world, the Angel must eat and accept pain, and learn all manner of things very fast indeed … Starting to read, during a phase of now legendary sunshine, I settled in my garden with a glass of red, and consequently spilled the wine on my wild strawberry blossoms due to sudden bursts of laughter.
‘What a strange life!’ said the Angel.
‘Yes,’ said the Vicar. ‘What a strange life! But the thing that makes it strange to me is new. I had taken it as a matter of course until you came into my life.’
Mr Angel is nothing like the pure and white angel of popular belief, more like the angel of Italian art, polychromatic, a musical genius with the violin. Listening … the Vicar lost all sense of duration, all sense of necessity … The reactions of the villagers oscillate across a hair-thin-divide between comedy and tragedy, while the bone of the story is psychological, and spiritual. Indirectly, the Vicar encounters his anima (his inner female) through the Angel’s love for Delia, the maid servant of the house. There is no escape. Things get intense. The Angel, over the span of a short week, is tainted by the wickedness of the world, and it crushes him. And the Vicar’s awakening from his narrow prison brings him into tragic conflict with his community.
* * *
Not much has changed. The world is crowded with wounded angels seeking compassion, and since our daily vocabulary offers little more than clichés for other realities, awakening rarely convinces, unless it is embodied and conveyed through atmosphere. Look out for the artist… the musician, painter, writer, animator, filmmaker … and the children.
‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The painting heading this post is by the Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg.
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