There is a well-known psychological test known as the Rorschach or ink blot test. When people look at these cards of meaningless blots of ink, what they see tells a lot about how their minds work.
Veterans may see traumatic images in these ink blots and experience flashbacks - seeing the same images, smelling the same smells, and feeling the same physical sensations they felt during the original event.
The most alarming response to the ink blot test is, "This is nothing, just a bunch of ink," because the normal response to ambiguous stimuli is to use our imagination to read something into them.
Now Bessel waxes poetic:
"The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play...they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel.
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word - all things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities - it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach (p. 17)."
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