Boredom cannot be accurately described as a feeling nor exactly as a state. It seems to fall between the two, but also to be something simple in nature and with a certain ontological depth, qualities it shares with wonder, with estrangement and with dejection. There seems to be a sort of flow in it, a settling ever lower, or a slowing down, so it appears to be a flow of a something which might conveniently be called energy. This dynamic potential is also there because it retains the possibility of reversal. Boredom is a condition of the imagination and the imagination does not require fresh stimulus or fuel to reawaken. The reversal of a depletion of the imagination, its flip into a sudden outpouring of power and creative dominance over the world, is one of the fundamental transformations that defines what we know as the inner life. In so far as this is brought about indirectly but deliberately by the action of a trigger in thought or practical experience it provides one of the deep evidences for the existence of the volitional self, just as the resulting feeling of power is naturally of your power, or the power of a you whose existence you had forgotten. The optical illusion which suddenly illuminates a self in the midst of all its conditions by way of such events is a virtuoso performance, as if a matador had been dropped into the ox-herding pictures.