Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box that separates the dreamer from the dreaming. For Harjo it depends. Television does imagine for you, she observes. With the oral traditions you have the community working together. People look at each other, engage each other with their hearts and eyes.
People are there together.
There is a communal imagining. That imagining involves not only the dynamic of people talking to each other and how they interact but also the time and place of telling. The moment you write those words down everything changes dramatically. The reader can, if they choose, imagine with the writer, but it's not the same as being there or coming from that place and having a shared history or memory. When you get to visual images such as movies or TV, everything is imagined for you.