He had been living alone for six years, and for six years he had been wishing for a girlfriend. He had tried everything. He had tried to meet the woman of his dreams at work or in a disco. He had met nice and beautiful women at parties and at concerts, but nothing beyond that had happened. He had answered lonely-hearts ads and placed ads in the paper himself. He had participated in group tours and had gone on holiday alone. He had allowed his friends to introduce him to interesting women or do anything they could think of which might help him. Hurt and frustrated, he finally told himself: “It’s like going up the smooth walls of a deep dry well. Whenever I have climbed up a few feet, I fall down again. My fingernails break. I fail, I fail, and again I fail. It’s hopeless.”

“Who knows”, he now heard a second voice within himself, “whether this inner image represents only a consequence to your futile efforts – or possibly the cause of them. Many things in this world move in circles.”

“Who knows”, said then a third voice, “if these pictures really contain any reality at all. Maybe it is like this: the well you’re in is just a film in your brain, and you’re just the animated cartoon producer.”

So he imagined the walls of the well opening up and becoming flatter and finding himself in a funnel which was getting wider and wider until. Finally he saw himself standing in the middle of a structure resembling a large music record. He enjoyed turning it into a cone, and then into a pillar on top of which he was standingwould stand. He decided on a flat cone with a platform for him to stand on as the structure he liked best. Two weeks later he got acquainted with a young woman. After a few weeks some problems occurred – some imbalance in their relationship as he described it. He remembered that he was still standing on the cone. He turned it into a flat surface and the problems disappeared.