Affording innerscapes: Dreams, introspective imagery and the narrative exploration of personal geographies

Abstract

The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short story The Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’s Embers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film, Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).

Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture

“…Yet, the two phenomena differ in some key features. RS involves the creation of alternate “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world (Bernini, 2018 ). In contrast, tulpas are essentially the adult version of imaginary companions, a natural phenomenon among children associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes (Fernyhough et al, 2019 ).…”