Introduction - Welcome To My Haunt!

Take a deep breath. Centre yourself. Loosen the threads that bind you to the conscious day.

Enter your haunt, a sacred place of imagination. Anything can happen here, and no-one can judge you.

Is this your unconscious mind?

You are alone; you are never alone. This is the cave of a thousand images, an ancient place which is here-yet-not-here.

​In the pools of shadow where you dip your finger, the power of thought itself will swarm at your touch.

If lockdown has shown us anything, it’s that staying cheerful and positive takes creativity as well as hope. The promise of new things to do and achieve really helps to keep us going. It’s no coincidence that the craft industry has boomed, people are sharing and watching videos and blogs and vlogs more than ever online, and who hasn’t listened to a sea shanty lately?

The raw material for all of this is ideas.

What are ideas made of? Can you choose to make them happen?

The first question is harder to answer. The best ideas seem to pop into our heads from nowhere, from an invisible wellspring that’s beyond our conscious reach. In this blog, I will explore methods to bring this mysterious inner space closer, more accessible; to improve the connections between the deep stirrings of the unconscious mind and our conscious, everyday awareness.

Speaking of which, this is one of many inspiration-methods which I’ll suggest as we move through the elusive topic of inspiration: finding or making unusual connections.

You might say there’s nothing new under the sun, but there are countless new combinations to be made between those things, new and unusual connections which can lead to ideas and ultimately, unique creations.

This is where the magic of Exquisite Corpse comes in. This happens to be one of the best story prompts I know, but it could be used to inspire any form of art or craft: anything that is built from raw ideas.
​
Pluck some words out of your own imagination-cave and send them to me by hitting the red “PLAY” button below. I’ll mix them up with other people’s words to make some silly and bizarre sentences.

Ideas are out there, waiting to happen. Play now, and let’s bring those sparks together!