This book comes with a few warnings:

It’s not mystical.

Reading it won’t help you see into the future or talk to the dead.

And it isn’t therapy, although it might have beneficial side effects.

What it will do is help you access your imagination and use it, in ways that you might never have imagined possible.

Using a series of exercises and increasingly in depth ‘trips’, the book sets out clear and concise steps to enable individuals and groups to access their imagination and unconscious reason, to work on behalf of others. Using a series of exercises such as ‘Becoming a Bat’, ‘Crawling’, ‘Draw a Sound’ and ‘Impersonating a Human’, Marcus Coates has developed his own practical techniques to solve problems that we might otherwise remain dumbfounded by.

Illustrated throughout with Coates’ own drawings, the text is both beguiling and funny – though intentionally serious.

It comes with one last warning:

The book is a practical manual.

All the exercises have been tried and tested. All are achievable and have realistic aims, and have no need of prior knowledge.

The author and publisher of this book are, however, not responsible for any injury or trauma incurred from following the instructions, techniques and exercises.

A short film of one of the exercises ‘Skylark’, is available as part of Book Works Presents #7, an occasional series of online readings, performances and more from artists and authors in isolation.

Other examples for ‘Becoming Gull’ and ‘Dance the Birdsong’, can be found here:

Marcus Coates was the winner of the 2013 Create Art Award supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. This book is the culmination of Coates’ project School of the Imagination, a course Coates ran in 2013.