In a letter addressed to fictional friend ‘Elpie’ (based of Elpis, the Greek goddess of hope) is attached a docufiction and imagined archive exploring the transformative power of the imagination. Can dreaming be radical, and is this why we are discouraged and shamed out of it from a young age? Is fiction naïve or a potential tool to drive change, and reshape the social and personal narratives?
This creative piece is based off real events. I documented a solo journey to New Forest, Southampton, on the 24th October 2023. One day before my Birthday; one day before I became an ‘adult’. I refuse to consign my ‘adult’ mind to a life without dreams; my mission is to prove the transformative power of the imagination. To demonstrate dreaming could be a creative tool for change, not a naive nuisance.
26th October 2023
Elpis sMyth
23 Bk Lane
Newquay
Dear Elpie,
I hope you are well. I thought I’d tell you about my week, and some exciting developments in my research! I feel like we have so little control of our lives. Well, you know that. It’s at the forefront of most of our frustrated venting conversations!
I’m exploring dreams. I believe they contain a radical power which could be used to transform society. I can’t believe all these years I’ve been told, like the majority of us, that daydreaming is a symptom of naïve distraction. Through my findings, I’ve discovered that we are fed this lie for a reason. They want to keep us powerless and stop the formation of a collective imagination. We have no limits! If the masses of us weren’t shunned into ‘normativity’ and rationality, we could alter the landscape of reality for the better.
The reason for my research was set off last Spring, when I last visited Paris. I visited the ‘Musee de Montmartre’, which was displaying a collection of female surrealist paintings. These paintings, I mean they glow softly and radiantly with this absolute clarity, each one presenting a vision for what could and often should be. If I ever had the money, I’d buy a piece by Leonora Carrington in a heartbeat. Probably ‘Self Portrait’, painted in 1938. It features her thematic white horse, mythical creatures and the colour green the way I imagine young children must experience it. 
The surrealists conjured up alternative extensions of reality. They prodded and uncovered the roots, vines and blooming flowers of dysfunctional elements of society, and what’s prescribed to us all. I think we dream as a form of attached escape. Like Freud described, they manifest our desires and dredge them from our subconscious. The subconscious always knows what is truly offbeat in our narratives.
I listened to this podcast by Serpentine, you should really listen to it. Gaylene Gould presents it. It’s called ‘re-worlding’ – a contemporary art term articulating the idea that we can use fiction, myth and creativity to reimagine society and actualise our visions. All the pent-up dreams and desires we all have… they’re a symptom of a need for change! The sign of power imbalance!
I’ve been researching like crazy. I want to develop tools and games to restart the level of imagination bullied out of us in school. I learnt that young children may be at risk of too much ‘daydreaming and escapism’ if their parents argue often, if things are not ‘right’ at home. Apparently, we spend 47% of our time in dreamland. The frequency of this is increasing, don’t you feel? The urgency to pull reality and dream together and knit them tightly is increasing; ‘re-worlding’ is in high demand.
Things are not ‘right’ at home. Our pens have been snatched from our hands and pages ripped away; the narratives of freedom, equality, hope and autonomy are being padlocked in the gates of ‘reality’.
I’ve attached scans of my diary pages from the journey. I became really obsessed with the idea of finding a white pony, like Leonora. Of course, I googled this, and they’re symbolic creatures. They represent purity and power, and luck. They’re signs of transformation: no surprise the surrealists painted them! They are emblems of hope. 
The diary pages have a mixture of research notes too, things I don’t want to bore you with in my letter, but I really recommend you investigate! The enlightenment philosophers were really encouraging of inward reflection and desire as a tool to lead your own life. They were anti external control. It’s a bit scrappy, sorry, but have a look through. I’ve kept you some stills from a film I made too!
Pin them up in your room somewhere, so you always have a white horse to remind you to shift your day-to-day structure and let your mind wander. Don’t be afraid to dream or imagine what could be.
See you soon,
Oli x
Location one: the train to New Forest
8.07 am: I’m on the train to New Forest, Southampton. I’ve decided I’m in a rut; minds gone grey like the buildings on the skyline. I hate the London skyline. My streets are charming enough, in their faux-whimsical way. But I’ve seen all their flowers.
I miss the countryside, the wise rhythm of the trees and the feeling of roots grounding me. Skyscrapers and tower blocks yank me up, scattering my mind. They distract me. That’s how I feel: distracted. I keep missing the right paths, like someone’s just pulling wool over my eyes. My imagination’s a void, so I want to go and see the ancient woodlands and the wild ponies. Immerse myself in some magic a while.
Location two: Ashhurst Forest Station
I’ve arrived in Ashhurst after two swift delays and four train changes. A woman walks across the station bridge three paces behind me. She sings a folk song out loud, some kind of nursery rhyme.
White paint beams celestially from a small inn framed by orange-pink leaves, scattered amongst thick arches of green. Green is everywhere, there are so many pots of green. I could paint 3,000 green paintings. I feel a bit reluctant to check my phone, but I’m not trying to get lost anywhere except in my thoughts. I scan my map. I place my phone in my back pocket and set off. I can smell smoke.
A man of about 50 glances up and follows me as I walk past a motor repair shop. He has the aura of someone who has never not lived and will never die. The gaze doesn’t leave me. I feel a little observed and that the crunch of my footsteps is listened too. I’m entering the woods. I have not just moved locations; it feels I’ve traversed further. The woods feel alive and electric, full of secrets, shared on a buzzing current.
Location three: deep in the woods, land of the misty stag
I’ve been walking slowly for about an hour, though at times my heart has raced. I’m not alone in this wood which is a feeling teetering between looked after and followed. I am not leaving footsteps in the gravel.
Everything feels like it’s soaked up one colour, a woody plum red, and absorbed it into its own palette. Immersed in this hue, I am part of each tree leaf root ground air song worm stag here, we are all mixed together. If I looked in a mirror, I would expect my cheeks to be stained damson.
My eyes trek from the path into the thick and ancient woodland, and watch light glisten, water drop, leaves shimmer and dance. All the worlds of the wood are alive, and their suns rose today. How could I visit these worlds? Not by conventional transport. My imagination is flooded like the soggy, dense heathland. I feel young.
A stag steps right out into the path. It’s only 10 am so it’s still misty. Immobile and wafting between the opposing pines, we make eye contact. Pupil to pupil I am taught that I am not enlightened. The stag cannot invite me into its world, but it knows the corruptness of mine.
It turns its head with slow grace and swiftly leaps back into the woodland shrubs, gone in a trail of silver mist and orange haze.
Location four: the potential kingdom at the end of the heathland
I cross a man walking his two greyhounds and my heart liquifies. I hate fearing walking; some narratives cross the boundaries of all worlds.
I go through a gate onto open heathland, the sunlight is white, and it singes my skin and I kind of gulp the air. It’s not fresher than in the trees but it tastes cleaner, and I like open spaces.
A very faint echo of fog levitates just above the grass. Heathland looks like flat texture. It looks like every colour speckled on a wet rug. It’s soft on the eyes and scratchy on the fingers. I list all the colours in my head:
- Moss silver
- The blue you get from reacted copper
- Glass bottle green, faded, washed up on the beach
- Lavender in a sepia toned photograph
- Iron rust orange
- Milk
- Grey blue powder fallen off an incense stick, burning
- The neon rose glow of that burning incense stick
11.43: I look at the time and I really need to wee. I squat in a short bush, in a small scattering of trees. Warm brown wood is backgrounding orange and red berries, the kinds I saw in fairy books when I was little.
A brown pony steps out slowly from a tree. I feel embarrassed and quickly pull up my trousers, and then watch the pony a bit as it eats grass, steps, eats grass, steps. It’s ignoring me. I look out across the heathland, which also could be called ‘expanse’.
I feel like I’m looking at a universe flattened down, which I could wander for days, passing only unbothered ponies and berries and shrubs, until eventually I arrived at a kingdom. The kingdom must be magic and feel like sleep. The magic has seeped out onto the landscape, which is glittering in the whites of my eyes.
Location five: lost
It’s just after lunchtime and I ate some leftovers for lunch. It felt inconceivable that my food from my world had crossed over with me. Maybe it should have turned to dust.
I am faraway.
I have seen so many ponies but I’m desperate to find a white pony. I think of the searing will that 7 year old me would have had to find a unicorn and realise I’m not a different self than when I was 7. Some form of time has taken place but I’m not sure that it desires age. They are in every place and time.
It’s approaching 2.20 now. I can’t roam too much longer; I have a train booked beyond the woods.
But I’ve dreamed of a white pony, and I know my imagination conjured the event of meeting it from a future that is fixed and necessary. Call it intuition, hunch, sixth sense: it’s a search for hope.
I am also slightly lost. 
Location six: point of a portal
A glint of a white flare streaks across copper blue wet grass. I am so lost right now. But I have found my pony (unicorn)!
I’m sort of hobble-running over in a way that is still attempting at subtlety. I don’t want to scare her away. 
I think about the human exceptionalism of this and ridicule myself. In my world, we imagine animals fear us. I’m beyond that, I’m in my place. I’ll be put in my place.
She is indifferent to my existence. As I approach, she looks at me completely unsurprised. This moment has unfolded before, I think. She is a very pale grey up close, but gleams as swishes of her tale lick the coral bracken. She’s roaming around a small circular space of heather and gorse, a scout scurries past.
Though nonchalant, I think she is more aware of my coming than the first pony I met. Perhaps this was expected, the first chapter of an entering. I wander where she’ll return tonight, to which kingdom.
I must leave quickly because my train is coming.
***
Note to self: 23rd October 2023
- Email Elpis to let her know about research
- Attach diary scans!
- Take out bins
- Buy tickets to Brighton for week comm. 1 dec.
‘I’ve been thinking, what is imagination? Any language that you create as an artist is a form of world-making… Everyone dreams. Everyone has dreams, and that is a process of world-making.’ – Tai Shani
‘I’ve always had access to other worlds. We all do because we dream’ – Leonora Carrington
To dream: verb
- Experience dreams during sleep
- Indulge in daydreams or fantasies about something greatly desired.
Tai Shani said in an interview on the Serpentine’s ‘Re-Worlding’ podcast, that ‘everyone has dreams, and that is a process of world-making’. Fittingly, my mind wandered through the woods and considered the potential of the imagination. It can be radical, because it is limitless, transformative and can effect change. Yet as we grow older, we cease to dream so much.
Some kids are labelled ‘away with the fairies’. This is ‘to not face reality or be in a dream world’. The term feels negated and accusatory and implies an absence of conformity. I take a stand here: an absence of convention implies stronger creativity and is hopeful.
The etymology of ‘away with the fairies’ began in Irish folklore. The Sidhe (a dominant, supernatural clan of fairies) spirited people away to underground lairs. The phrase was born in medieval times, where reality and myth were merged and commonplace. Only in the 80s was it thrown around with its modern connotations, by the Washington Post, to describe the ‘hippy ideals of the 60s’.
‘To be in a dream world’ (to dream, to imagine) became negated by conservative power figures. Hippy culture was about envisioning radical egalitarian ways to exist, and it caught on, spreading love like wildfire.
Does this express that to conjure up new worlds is silly and ridiculous? Or does it express fears at dreams’ radical potential for transformation of the narrative, and the world?
Why are those in power so afraid of dreaming, if it is so futile?
A poem for new forest:
Hope is a faithless condition.
I am a creature in a world ablaze.
A pocket in spacetimematter, your birch and bracken radiate
With wisdom, lamp light in a black street.
Here, nothing blossoms as regularly as a petal.
Flowers which blossom in multiplicity light my walking
Footsteps even in day, when the sun is burning.
The heat singes my skin, I seek a person less shade.
I found this unfurled in you.
Follow the beat of the roots always, which vibrate
As strings on a loop in rich greenness.
Fickle thorns are embedded in my pores.
Sometimes I feel sticky
Like the moon floor, if the gardener watered it
And it became a white clay pit.
Milk, pearl, sepia lavender,
Teeming like your heather,
Leading my feet, rushing me along and through the wind
Carrying me to a potential new land
Still here, still earth, still now and then, but hope.
