From Barstool Dreams to Real Imagination

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that getting into conversations with strangers in bars could end badly. I tended to get more insulting and argumentative after a few beers. So, I usually preferred to just drink alone. I’d have a book with me in the bar, but I’d spend much of the time just daydreaming. One of the things that attracted me to alcohol was how it seemed to free my imagination. I could fall into a drunken fantasy about my future success, and this could go on for hours.

A common fear about quitting alcohol and other drugs is that it might somehow inhibit imagination. This can be a particular worry for creative people. I found the opposite was true. My imagination while drinking was similar to pulp fiction or chewing gum. I would dream of being successful and people liking me – I’ll show them. I would dream of having a lot of money or becoming famous. I had the imagination of someone who was dying of thirst. Alcohol seemed to make me more creative, so I’d try to write, but everything I wrote while drunk felt self-indulgent and as depressing as a hormonal teenager’s diary. I’d always end up ripping it up when sober.

I remember reading how the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified two types of imagination. One involved frozen images (he calls this “fancy”), and the other is real imagination. The former is a desperate attempt to escape the prison of normal living while the latter provides the possibility of liberation within it. Frozen images are disembodied while real imagination is embodied.

Giving up alcohol didn’t weaken my imagination, it set it free. Mindfulness gave me the ability to come back to the body, to be with things like emotions and moods, and it is these that became the fuel for real imagination. An imagination that could now move beyond my preconceived ideas about myself, other people, and the world. I followed the advice of William Blake and escaped the imprisoned mind by cleaning the doors of perception.

My Struggle to CommunicateFrom Barstool Dreams to Real ImaginationDisappearing in an Irish ParkMoving Statues in Ireland Trigger EnchantmentPatrick Kavanagh’s Teaching on the Passionate Transitory

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