A Visit to the Dentist - an Experience Mediated by Imagination.

We approach our daily life, with our well honed conceptual apparatus and in this way we experience the world.  But that is not to say there is just experience pure and simple.

Take my visit to the dentist yesterday. A 'wisdom' tooth has been causing me pain intermittently and the Dentist advises it will have to come out.

So I sit there, having this experience of someone probing in my mouth and injecting me, 'just give you one more...there...'
And I, who am usually alright with this kind of thing, suddenly have my imagination invading my dentist's chair experience.

I think of the incident last week and imagine it as if I was there.

I had received a call to pick up a relative at the hospital as she had passed out having a 'blood test'. I rush round to the hospital and see this person sitting in a wheelchair a deathly white.  I am completely thrown, she is always so ruddy cheeked and robust.

These thoughts now enter my mind as the Dentist informs me, he will  give me '...just one more injection to deaden the..'...and my imagination is overpowering my experience. What if I pass out? What if I pass out like she did? How imitative of others we are.  I feel myself going, oh no, for goodness sake.  Is that a swirling feeling, oh no, |Jes...uus is that a creeping blackness?
"Are you alright?"
"What...oh sure, perfectly alright."
"Sorry, just thought you were getting a little bit distressed there."
"No, no, I am perfectly fine."

The dentist has thwarted my imagination.

So each of our experiences are mediated by our imagination.

What does this realisation do for me? I now understand that the  conceptual apparatus by which I feel I am experiencing things is mediated by experience. This, I hope,  may help me to adjust my conceptual filters, juggle my perspectives and in this way create fresh windows on my interpretation of my experiences.

It is a kind of reaching out dialectically to understand one's own experiences rather than the usual passive inner deductive analysis.  

I hope in this way I might begin to probe a few uncharted seas about my experiences,  rather than a continued view of experiences from a few, seemingly secure concept island of what experience is.  As if it is some stand alone, untainted
experience.