THAT DAY

I'm reading The Candle of Vision by AE (George Russell), a century-old book of practical tips for the working mystic. He says you'll manifest whatever you can steadily picture (NOT easy!), including a community of likeminded people:

Because I was a creature of many imaginings and of rapid alternations of mood... there came to me assurance of a truth, of all truths most inspiring to one in despair in the Iron Age and lost amid the undergrowths of being. I became aware of a swift echo or response to my own moods... I found every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect, endowed with magnetic power to attract to it its own kin.

Will and desire were as the enchanter's wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities. Around a pure atom of crystal all the atoms of the element in solution gather, and in like manner one person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered. I met these people seemingly by accident along country roads, or I entered into conversation with strangers and found they were intimates of the spirit. I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that I, without search, would soon meet people of a certain character, and so I met them...

It was hardly a week after my first awakening that I began to meet those who were to be my lifelong comrades on the quest, and who were, like myself, in a boyhood troubled by the spirit. I had just attempted to write in verse when I met a boy whose voice was soon to be the most beautiful voice in Irish literature [W.B. Yeats, who AE met c.1881]. I sought none of these out because I had heard of them and surmised a kinship. The concurrence of our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of spiritual gravitation, like that which in the chemistry of nature makes one molecule fly to another...

I believe AE. On the (rare) occasions I visualize small unimportant things I want and ask the universe for them, they promptly appear!

But I'm terribly reluctant to let myself picture what I intensely long for--friends, lovers, colleagues, money, respect...

So does that mean I'm single, lonely, broke, my work mostly unseen... by choice? At a level deeper than mere emotion?

THAT NIGHT

I meet a unicorn and we have a little talk.

The unicorn, to my surprise, is web-literate; knows my art & writing.

And encourages me! "Your dream-arts are unique; inventing a whole idiom or artistic genre is inherently difficult. You're doing fine alone."

But unicorns are telepathic, not verbal.

Am I mis-translating broad emotional encouragement into human language, falsely precise?

THAT MORNING

I wake and tell the unicorn dream to a girl I like.

Wait, did I overstate the unicorn's gist even more? Because she looks skeptical and asks:

"Are you sure this unicorn actually said "You're into obscure stuff so of course it's hard to find a girlfriend"? Because you told me about that AE guy, about how compatible people should appear easily. Either AE's wrong, the unicorn's wrong, or you're misquoting!"

Soon as she says it, I know she's right--I'm putting words in that unicorn's mouth.

And how often does this happen? Do I often distort feedback like this?

And then I wake again! Her advice was part of the dream, too.

ACTION

• Practice harmless visualization, like AE. But think it through--picturing friends or lovers you'll run away from, or a publisher you'll put off because you can't face deadlines, or a lottery you'll magically win, depriving other players of the prize... that's wrong. Resolve your own ambivalence before bothering others! Waffling's unfair to others as well as to me.
• One visualization I SHOULD try is: picture myself listening literally! If I'd done that in my dream, I'd have noticed the unicorn called only my work-solitude reasonable, implying my social, sexual and financial deprivation might arise from conflicting wishes, or a refusal to wish at all.

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