Cassandra Vieten is Clinical Professor and Director of the Center for Mindfulness at the Centers for Integrative Health in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego. She is also Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and co-founder and co-chair of the World Imagination Network. This blog post is a working excerpt from Cassi’s forthcoming book on imagination from Simon and Schuster, Spring 2026.
A post by Cassandra Vieten
As a psychologist and researcher, my career has focused on how people change. In particular, I have investigated the experiences, practices, and environments that transform people’s worldviews—their stories about themselves and the world—and as a result, change their thinking patterns, behavior, biology and brain. Over a couple of decades of research, I am convinced that extraordinary experiences can change us in profound and lasting ways. Just like an experience of trauma can change us in lasting ways, a profoundly positive experience can change us in positive ways: kind of like post-traumatic stress in reverse.
But here’s the surprising part: those experiences don’t always have to be real. More accurately, those experiences don’t have to be externally or physically real: they can happen in our imagination. Practicing imagination holds the potential to transform our lives into something extraordinary. Even negative imagination, when we don’t get stuck there, can be helpful in our personal growth journey.
Psychologically, there is an ontological weight to imagination. Studies show that imagined scenarios can have similar psychological and biological responses to real scenarios. You can try this for yourself by imagining a cool ripe lemon, and slicing it open as juice squirts out, and slowly squeezing the juice from a slice into your mouth. Is your mouth watering, and almost ready to pucker?
Like this, in one study, researchers paired a specific tone with an uncomfortable, but not unbearable, shock (think Pavlov’s dogs, but with a modern neuroscience twist). Later, when participants heard the tone without the shock, their bodies still reacted, as if bracing for impact. But here’s the fascinating part: when participants simply imagined hearing the tone, their brains responded almost as if it were actually happening. The auditory cortex lit up (even though there was no sound), along with the nucleus accumbens, which processes fear, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which handles risk and aversion. Marianne Reddan, lead author of the report on the study said, "Statistically, real and imagined exposure to the threat were not different at the whole brain level, and imagination worked just as well.” "This research confirms that imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies in ways that matter for our wellbeing," said Tor Wager, director of CU Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and co-senior author of the paper, published in Neuron.
Decades of research show that the true engine of change isn't always what happens to us—it’s how what happens transforms the stories we tell about ourselves and the world.
How We Imagine the Past Changes the Future
Ted Chiang, in his brilliant short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction, reflects: “Right now, each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.” Our memories, Chiang suggests, aren't fixed records but active reconstructions. We are constantly reweaving them to fit the evolving storylines of our lives.
Psychiatrist Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who has worked for decades at the intersection of indigenous healing and narrative psychiatry, makes a similar claim: "The self is an assemblage of stories." To heal, he says, we must first tell our story as we know it, and then imaginatively construct new, more empowering versions. In Remapping Your Mind (2015), he describes a process of helping people re-enter old narratives, not to erase them, but to re-interpret them, to invite fantasy and future projection into the rigid, painful structures of memory.
Memory, after all, is not a faithful recording. An entire scientific literature shows how malleable, and unreliable, our memories are. We embellish, fill gaps, misattribute details, and season our recollections with later experiences. Memory evolved not for historical accuracy, but for survival: to emphasize and even exaggerate threats, rewards, and lessons in ways that help us avoid threats and be motivated toward rewards in the future. In that sense, much of memory already is imagination.
Therapeutic reimagining isn’t about lying to ourselves. It’s about reclaiming narrative agency. It means shifting from "this happened to me" to "this is how I now relate to what happened—and who I have become because of it." Take Liana, a participant in one of our workshops. Liana once described her childhood as “low-drama”—no overt trauma, but a persistent sense of invisibility. She never quite felt like she belonged anywhere, at school, in her career, with friend groups. Through therapeutic work, she revisited a memory of sitting quietly in the backseat while her parents argued. Instead of erasing the event, she reimagined a scene in which her adult self joined the child, offering comfort, telling her "You are not alone, I’ve got you, you are worthwhile, you are going to find your tribe in the future.” That simple shift, not denying the pain but bringing new meaning to it, catalyzed real-world change. Liana began speaking up more, pitching projects, pursuing long-deferred dreams. Her future opened, because her relationship to her past had transformed. When we engage in this kind of work, we don't erase pain. We change our relationship to it. The story wasn’t finished—it was paused, and we can pick up the pen again.
The Future Needs Reimagining, Too
If imagination can heal our relationship to the past, can it also help us build a better future? Research suggests yes. A 2018 meta-analysis of over 77 studies found that individuals with strong future orientation consistently fared better across work, education, and health outcomes. A friend and colleague of mine, neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge has gone even further. In collaboration with others, including Michael Sapiro, PhD, she developed "time-travel narratives,” which are therapeutic exercises where individuals imagine connecting with their past, present, and future selves.
In one pilot project, incarcerated individuals engaged in these practices, receiving "messages" from their future selves offering hope, advice, and encouragement. Many participants reported greater well-being, and notably, those with more adverse childhood experiences improved the most. Mossbridge’s team even developed a public app called Time Machine that lets users record and listen to these self-to-self messages. It's a gentle but profound intervention: by engaging the imagination, people build bridges between who they’ve been, who they are, and who they might become.
Becoming the Author of Your Life
My colleagues and I teach workshops at the Esalen Institute and elsewhere called The Next You: The Art of Futuremaking. This work is based on the premise that instead of letting the future happen to you, you can consciously shape the conditions, inside and out, that make a meaningful and fulfilled future more likely.
Think of it like worldbuilding. In speculative fiction, authors create entire worlds with their own rules, languages, and values. You can do the same for your inner world, your future world. What if your new inner "currency" wasn't achievement, but compassion? What if the energy you valued most wasn’t adrenaline, but awe? What if the primary language you spoke internally was not criticism, but curiosity?
Building a new internal world through imagination is not escapism. It's resilience. It’s agency. It's refusing to be trapped by the circumstances handed to you, and instead, daring to ask: What kind of world could I build, starting from the inside?
The Best Guide May Be Your Future Self
Many spiritual traditions ask, “What would the wise teacher do?” But there's another question worth asking: “What would my wiser future self do?”
Malik, one of our workshop participants, wasn’t sure what he wanted, but knew only that his successful career in Silicon Valley left him feeling hollow. Through guided futuremaking practices, he met his future self: not richer, not more impressive, but more anchored and alive. In imaginative exercises, his future self talked with him not just about what he needed to work toward, but about what he needed to let go of: the belief that sacrifice equals worth, the need for approval from people who could never offer it. Malik’s future self became his inner mentor. Not perfect. Not infallible. But wise in ways Malik needed to hear. And slowly, Malik began to change — not with grand gestures, but with steady shifts toward a life he could belong to.
Imagination, memory, and the future are all woven together in the brain. Neuroscientists Shahar Arzi and Amnon Dafni-Merom (2020) leave us with a kind of koan, suggesting from their work that "remembering the past and imagining the future may be regarded as remembering the future and imagining the past." When you reclaim your story, becoming a co-author of it through the power of imagination, you’re not just healing the past. You’re actively shaping who you’re becoming. You may not be able to control what life hands you. But you can choose the story you tell about it. And the act of choosing, the art of imagining differently, might just change everything.
References
Arzy, S., & Dafni-Merom, A. (2020). Imagining and experiencing the self on cognitive maps. In A. Abraham (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the imagination (pp. 311–328). Cambridge University Press.
Chiang, T. (2013). The truth of fact, the truth of feeling. Subterranean Online. http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang
Mehl-Madrona, L. (2015). Remapping your mind: The neuroscience of self-transformation through story. Simon and Schuster.
Mossbridge, J., Johnson, K., Washburn, P., Williams, A., & Sapiro, M. (2021). Smartphone time machine: Tech-supported improvements in time perspective and wellbeing measures. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 744209. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.744209
Reddan, M. C., Wager, T. D., & Schiller, D. (2018). Attenuating neural threat expression with imagination. Neuron, 100(4), 994–1005.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.10.047