Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

Frater, Allan: - Allan Frater grew up on the edge of a small village near Edinburgh, reading comics and walking his dog Jet in the surrounding countryside. He survived an engineering degree and a failed career as a maths teacher by watching movies and reading novels. Inspired by Jack Kerouac and Herman Hesse, he spent his twenties living and working in Buddhist communities where he came across the east-meets-west fusion of transpersonal psychology and eventually trained to become a psychotherapist. His psychotherapy practice and teaching career at the Psychosynthesis Trust have researched the meeting place between transpersonal psychology and an image-based approach to ecotherapy, the results of which are presented in this book. Now living in North London, married and middle-aged, he feels fortunate to have kept touch with his original sources of inspiration, continuing to read comics and spend time outdoors walking his dog Milly.