The following article first appeared in CAHOOTS, No 70, Oct 1999-Jan 2000, p.27. FANTASY OR REALITY - MYTH, MAGIC AND METAPHOR My feet lightly touch the rough French road. Strong and silent am I. The wind and the rain have stirred me to restlessness and I find myself driven again to the dark sodden clearing. The hairs on my neck and back prickle as I strain to hear and see what no human senses can. I lick the air and wait silently, balanced precari-ously on this brink between human reserve and animal impulse. At last I turn and run, shy of this heightened sense of reality that my fantasy has brought me. This is gift enough for now. As a therapist I find I am touched at many points by myth, magic and metaphor. The roles of storyteller, fool and gatekeeper are central to therapy. The storyteller is the gatekeeper sitting on the threshold of fantasy and reality, just as the fool picks his way blithely over treacherous precipices. So the story is the bridge between the voice of the soul and the ears of the world making audible that which might otherwise be too terrible, implausible or unutterable. But if I am to sit comfortably on this cusp of light and shade of known and unknown I must know something of my own stories, my own fantastic reality, for in the head of the one we find the tail of the other and much can be learned from the realm of faery. As is known about faery time, a day in the underworld can be as years in the upper world - all the joys, triumphs and catastrophes of our lives condensed into one day as we step through the faery veil. And such is the power of metaphor in story that a single image or theme can express so clearly that which may have been years in the making and the mundane finds its mirror in the fantastic. So the gatekeeper becomes fisherman and sits with hazel rod waiting for this precious fish to bite - for this is a magical creature and holds in its flesh the power of transformation. I have an enormous trust that whatever creature emerges from this sacred pool is the one which needs most to be seen and heard right now, however grotesque, fantastical or mundane it may seem to our worldly senses. Each story has its own unique gift. Our task is to listen carefully and sometimes to retell that story to its creator so that they too can hear it, often for the first time. I have worked with Tina for over two years and recently we created a story together in which a small honeysuckle had weathered a long, hard and bitter winter. The story told us of the heroic journey made by that small plant through deadly, impene-trable frost into the relief and thaw of spring bringing with it the un-expected tearing pains of buds and shoots, through to the summer and autumn from blossoms to ripening berries. Through this process Tina was able to hear her story for the very first time. This story has been years in the making. She had had it witnessed and then handed back to her. This story was never unpicked and was left at a metaphorical level to do its work, marking a dramatic and moving turning point for this client. With the therapeutic use of story there is the apparent paradox that often the most successful, moving and powerful stories are those that are most removed from concrete reality. The very process of projecting far out of the present perceived reality can clear away the clutter of lived content and reveal both the process and the person more clearly. And because the story is born out of fantasy it gives the client the opportunity to both reject and accept elements of the story according to their needs at that moment. With "The Story You Need to Hear Now" devised by Dr Mooli Lahad the client can choose at an intuitive level the distance their story needs to be at, and because stories are usually told in the third person they bypass many of our usual defences. The creative process opens the side door through which image, symbol and metaphor can pass. Murray Cox talks about the depth-charge effect of metaphor, that because we are not used to defending against stories in the usual way they can touch us profoundly at a deep level, having passed through the surface levels with hardly a splash. Experience shows that there can also be a delayed action effect and that as with a dream, a story can grow in richness and meaning and can be revisited often over time. I know for myself that I am still gleaning insights from a story I made nearly seven years ago. Story-making and story-telling are still part of our cultural her-itage with most children still being exposed to fairy stories and other tales in some form or another. So as adults we still have at some level a pre-established language for story making. The sys-temic and family therapists White and Epston would argue that story-making is a defining characteristic of the human race and that we make stories out of our experience in order to give it meaning. I have recently used story-making with a small group of people who have had serious long-term mental health problems such as schizophrenia. Without exception each person could create a meaningful story using the 6-Part Story Method (6PSM). Stories have their own internal language which can tell us much about the way in which a person constructs the world. The 6PSM, devised by Mooli Lahad, is a method of structuring the making of a story to enable the teller to construct it bit by bit rather than having to visualise the whole thing all at once. Once constructed, the story can then be listened to with the BASIC Ph process in mind which tells us much about preferred styles of contact and coping: those based on beliefs (B), affect and emotions (A), social networks and relationships (S), imagination, magic and creativity (I), cognitive/ra-tional processes (C) and physical or kinaesthetic experience (Ph). By listening for these ways of understanding the world as the client tells us their story we can learn each person's unique balance of lan-guage and contact styles. We can hear what is present and what is missing or forgotten in their language. So for example we can hear when a person's story is dominated by cognition and logic and lacks emotions (or vice versa), or when their story is one of solitude and isolation or alternatively is dominated by many powerful figures. Obviously in practice the themes in a story are not always quite so polarised, but we can get a sense of the balance of the BASIC Ph elements. This makes the 6PSM a very useful assessment tool that also has a place in ongoing therapy. And even without the BASIC Ph analysis the 6PSM is a powerful exercise and can provide rich ma-terial to be worked on in therapy. As we think about fantasy and reality we must also give some thought to the setting in which our work takes place, that of the therapy room, for it is a unique and magical vessel. As with a tradi-tional magic circle it becomes a world between worlds when we step into it with a client. It has a reality and a timescale of its own. We must attend carefully to the rituals of this sacred and magical place and again become the gatekeeper whose job it is to define the boundaries and make the container safe for the alchemy of therapy to begin.     Tracey Dent-Brown is a trained counsellor,; Occupational Therapist and a senior trainee Gestalt Psychotherapist working part time in private practice and part time in the NHS. She can be contacted at Kairos Counselling and Training Services in Hessle, East Yorkshire.