“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

There was a girl sitting on the sand enviously watching her siblings play in the ocean water. She wanted to play, but she was young and wasn't allowed in that water without her parents who were currently occupied with doing nothing. So she sat bored and unhappy, digging her small fingers into the wet and malleable sand until she grabbed up a big clump and started to mold it into a ball. Once done she grabbed another and repeated the process several times; then she started stacking them on one another. Eventually, she had a small mound of sand. Wanting to see how high she could make it, the girl continued stacking sand until the mount was almost eye level and that's when she saw it. What did she see? In reality, it was nothing more than an uninteresting bunch of sand, but in her mind she saw a tower! The kind of tower princesses lived in and knights protected, and in that instant her boredom vanished. The world around her disappeared, and without hesitation she started to remove the sand from the bottom of that fatty mound to create the base of the tower.

Some time passed and the girls work was coming together when a boy around her age walked up interested in what she was doing. The boy asked what the girl was making and to that she responded with, "I'm making a tower." The boy looked at what the girl was working on and that's when he saw it! The tower... Only his tower wasn't for princesses. His tower was dark and old guarded dragons. The captivated boy then asked if he could help for which the girl agreed and they sat together. With the extra help, they soon had two towers connected by an unsophisticated wall. The towers had really nothing in common and ranged in craftsmanship. The girls tower focused more on the aesthetics as she put sea shells to mimic windows, while the boy spent most of his time seeing how tall he could get his without risking a collapse.

The two were working on the third tower when two older boys approached. At this point there was no need to ask what the girl and the boy were doing for it was obvious, they saw the Castle! One of the older boys concluded that a Castle needs defense from attackers and without asking he started digging a moat around the three towers while his friend ran in search of shells, sticks, and rocks to be used as tools and ornaments. Working together in almost complete silence, the four children built and built and when they were done they didn't have a tower or a Castle. They had a city with everything that their four minds could think of. There was a place for the horses, a front gate built with sticks, a moat that filled with sea water when a wave push far enough onto land, it was magnificent! When the sun started to fall and they all acknowledged their job was done, the girl stood up tired and sandy. As her creative fog lifted she noticed that they were not alone. They had onlookers. People of all ages were standing around looking at what they had created in awe, but that wasn't all. When she looked past the onlookers she saw what must have been a hundred people separated in their own smaller groups making everything you could imagine out of sand...

I wrote this short story to try and explain something. As human beings, we live in separate worlds. The most obvious is the physical world where we interact with our environment through our senses and the ability to move objects with our own mass. Then we have the dream state. The dream state doesn't apply to any rules. It has no limits, It's not big, It's not small, and it doesn't even exist, but it's there. Its our imagination, our ability to create anything we want, at any time, and completely separate ourselves from the constrictions of the physical world, but as creators we don't want that separation! As creators, we live in the dream state and through creation we can be things from that nonexisting place into the physical world.

As creators we are shamans that walk the lines of reality and tie these two states of being together. Whether you're a painter, photographer, writer, musician, or castle builder your ideas start in the dream state. When the girl in my story saw the tower for the first time all she was looking at was a mound of sand, but in her mind she saw the tower. By making the tower come to life she pulled something from her imagination and brought it into the physical world. She tied the two realities together.

All of us do this and it's important! By creating, you're taking something from a nonexistent world in your head and making into something other people can experience. Once you create something that people can see or hear, like a song or a painting you've successfully created something that can affect someone else's mind. The three boys and the onlookers in the story are examples of this. The first boy saw what the girl was working on and he implanted an idea from her into him. Only he got a different picture. When he started working on his own tower, he was taking something out of his own imagination. Then the two older boys came and saw what was being done. Ideas traveled and the cycle repeated. By the end of the story, the girl notices that the cycle repeated so many times that hundreds of people started making their own ideas come to life.

By being creators we not only tie the physical and the imaginary world together, we can affect other people's consciousness. Once you change the way people see themselves and the world around them you change them as a person and in effect can change their actions. This is by definition magic! "The power of influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces." You are magicians, so create!