Painting by Brian Froud

I’ve been looking into old faery lore lately. Not the sanitised Victorian version of miniature winged  beauties, but at the old tales of strange encounters, customs that go back beyond memory, time lost in the faery realm and the darker aspects of the hidden folk. At the instigation of my writing partner, I watched a documentary and, amongst a few other ideas, one in particular got me thinking. The suggestion was that if faeries do not have a concrete and objective reality of their own in our world, but do exist for us in the realms of imagination, perhaps imagination itself is a state of being we do not fully understand, bridging the gap between our usual vision of reality and unreality  in a way that has a validity of its own. As a concept, and after years of working with magical systems, that…