It is interesting to note that this idea—fear’s being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain—figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain—poets, take note—and thus psychological torture more effective than physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983:

"The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

A shifting collage of images constitutes my past.  I arrange and rearrange the images: crafting themes, pondering possible patterns, generating self-referential symbols.

I imagine past happiness and hurts. I imagine future death.  Between and extending from these images, I imagine my life.

Thursday evening I had a conversation.  The conversation spawned images of how I might spend most of my waking hours for most of the rest of my life.  It was only talk.  The prospect is entirely imaginary.

Yet what I do with this bit of imagination will have some influence on future images.

"I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic -- with this linguistic reference for which I did not find everything that would have suited me -- and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real in the very form of the knot." Jacques Lacan, Seminarie XXII