Two streams that run in parallel: what is happening and our imaginative realisation of what is happening. The babble and dazzle of the latter may seem to drown out the former but is only ever its tributary. They run together but are almost always going in separate directions, are out of synch in their meanderings and changes. We live from the imagination, expecting a certain lag behind the event, preferring to discover things for the first time when we recreate them as memories or fables, photographs or posts. On rare occasions the two streams coalesce, or perhaps such occasions are not so rare when under some overwhelming constraint of enjoyment, but when they arise in a relaxed way the door is opened to that state of waking dream where we can make free with our memory, where memory is released from time. The paths to this oasis of coincidence are various but if we try to bring it about it is usually through upending the balance by intensifying the awareness of the real. But we only act through imagination, and must suffer being acted upon by a reality which denies our intentions as if by a law of nature. The quest for coinciding with ourselves is doomed to fail and yet is more significant in its failure than the random gifts of circumstance. In this light the apparently narcissistic quest in the culture to realise one's own image is a rigorous form of self-inquiry, mediated by will rather than thought. It is the impossibility that is the hardest to grasp in its fullness and depth since it is the correlate of unreasonable desire.