Expanding on Sandra’s plight, there are others driven by vision rather than goals. I know people who “want to be a writer someday.” I had a friend once who said, “When I retire I want to be a painter.” Many others want to be golfers, dancers, socialites, woodworkers, potters, rich, and wise. But they are so busy dreaming about being something that there’s no time left over to do anything—and all of those goals can only be achieved by competent and intrepid doing. Without doing, there is no being.

In particular, I am reminded of a young composer wannabe named Dale, who had a vision similar to Sandra’s. He could “just hear the music,” clearly, as though it were being played in his head. But when I asked him to sing it, or play it on his guitar, or write it down—he was stumped. He preferred to fantasize about the image in his mind rather than to realize anything that might establish it unambiguously as music and allow him to share it with others.

Like Sandra, I believe that Dale constructed a spatial, visual image of the result or product of music, rather than imagining music itself. To test this hypothesis, I asked him to describe what he heard. What he described were not sounds, but feelings.