respectively. Next were place questions (questions 4, 6, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 22),
which allowed the respondents to express ideas about how place in literature, and
place generally has affected them. Questions 12 and 13 were designed to permit
the respondents to make more self-determined, reflective responses, thereby
ensuring the validity of the interpretation of their responses. Question 15 is an
open question intended to elicit any additional information that the respondent may
have cared to offer, encouraging a spontaneous validity of the exercise. Questions
14,16, and 21 also served to confirm the fantasy-receptive-type personality but
allowed for depth-psychological answers or responses that might identify
transpersonal elements. The questions were altered only to accommodate the self-
identified status as shamans and for the writers but in every other respect paralleled
the Readers’ Questionnaire. The writers were asked two additional questions, 22
and 23, to determine their perceptions of a reader’s experience and about their own
intentions in writing.
The questionnaire cover sheet explained to the respondents that I wanted to
investigate whether mythopoeic writers sometimes enter, in their creative reverie,
an altered state of consciousness similar to that experienced by shamans. I was
also interested in whether there is a particular type of reader who is more receptive
to such literature that results from a state of altered consciousness; MLC. I t was
further explained that the reason why the questionnaire included questions
concerning childhood illnesses and reading habits was to determine the potential of
the respondent to phantasy-receptiveness; phantasy not in the derogatory sense of
fanciful or capricious but rather in the sense of the power of the psyche to imagine.
Respondents were also advised that they did not have to answer every question on
the questionnaire and that they could make additional comments.
3.5 The Questions
The following questions are those directed at the shamans and I have shown
the modifications to these questions for the readers and mythopoeic writers, in
parenthesis.
Question 1.
Do you believe that serious creative writing involves an altered state of
consciousness similar to that involved in Shamanic States of Consciousness?