Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

Start with the reversal: the solid world is the copy, and what happens in the mind is the original. You do not have to accept the metaphysics to feel the pull of it. Almost everything around you that was made by people existed as an image before it existed as a thing, and the ones nobody imagined never arrived at all.

Take your own picturing more seriously than you probably do. What you rehearse in idle moments is not harmless daydreaming; it is the draft that the rest of your life keeps trying to match. Choose the draft with more care.