We do not perceive the world directly. This is one of the most rigorously established findings in contemporary neuroscience, first stated in 1867 and confirmed by contemporary research.

The brain is a prediction engine. Continuously, and far beneath all awareness, it runs a generative model of the world, a model that predicts what the incoming sensory data is going to be before the data arrives.

The incoming signal does not deliver the world to you. It merely corrects the prediction wherever the prediction has gone wrong. Some in neuroscience call ordinary, healthy, waking perception a controlled hallucination.

The brain is hallucinating the world, generating it from the inside out, and the sensory signals are merely the control, the leash, the corrective feedback that keeps the hallucination tethered to reality.

Between perception and incoming data lies the realm of the embodied imagination that continuously creates the embodied world you live in.

Robert Bosnak, PsyA.D is a Jungian psychoanalyst with 55 years of psychotherapy experience. He trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich with training analysts James Hillman, Aniela Jaffe and Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig.

He developed an original method in psychotherapy, Embodied Imagination®, which is practiced worldwide under the auspices of the International Society for Embodied Imagination®, for psychotherapy, theatre, film and creativity enhancement.

Robert has authored several books, including A Little Course in Dreams, Christopher’s Dream: Dreaming and Living with AIDS, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, and Embodiment: Creative imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel.

He is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and a founding director of the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary.

He has his private practice on the Internet while living in Santa Barbara, CA and Sydney, Australia.