Since antiquity, mystery schools and esoteric spiritual orders have taught devotees to converse with spirits, angels, ancestors, and deities. It has been central to the sacred task of harnessing and training the imagination so that it serves one's highest purposes rather than being a reckless spinner-of-illusions that leaks psychic energy.

Spirit workers of many Indigenous cultures have also cultivated relationships with beings and creatures who reside on the other side of the veil. For example, an Inuit angakkuq, medicine person, enlists the help of a tuurngaq, spirit guide, to consult with her deceased ancestors.

Groundbreaking psychologists Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz called the practice "active imagination." Jungian author Mary Watkins wrote a trenchant book, Waking Dreams, which explores its history and offers specific techniques.

Comparable practices have a long history among artists, as well. German composer Robert Schumann engaged in extensive dialogues with his imaginary friends, Florestan and Eusebius. They provided valuable ideas for his musical scores.

Victor Hugo was the celebrated French author who created the five-volume, 1,462-page novel Les Misérables. He participated in séances that brought him into contact with over a hundred spirits, including Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Joan of Arc, and Sappho.

For much of his career, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill did work that was well-grounded, lucidly crafted, and formal in style. But while assembling his sprawling mystical epic, The Changing Light of Sandover, Merrill used a Ouija board to solicit the input of disembodied spirits, including several archangels and the souls of dead writers W. H. Auden and Gertrude Stein. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for that tome.

We won’t catalog all the many artists who have engaged in variations on this practice. But we will mention the Italian poet, Dante. In his book Inferno, he called on the ancient Roman poet Virgil to guide him through his fictional trip through Hell.

Among the notables the two met in Limbo were poets Homer and Ovid, the mathematician Euclid, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

One more example: Writer and artist William Blake made drawings of many eminent people who had died before he was born. Julius Caesar was the subject of one portrait. Others included Dante, Shakespeare, and Moses.

How did Blake capture their likenesses in such great detail? He testified that their spirits visited him as apparitions.