Mais quel bien-être que cette vie énergique dans les images ! Que cette vie énergique imagée est digne des Dieux ! Si l’on pouvait étudier les travaux d’Hercule dans leurs rêveries dynamiques, comme des images de la volonté première, on accéderait à une sorte d’hygiène centrale qui a déjà, à peu près, toutes les vertus de l’hygiène effectuée. Imaginer lyriquement un effort, donner à un effort imaginaire les splendides images légendaires, c’est vraiment tonifier l’être entier, sans encourir la partialité musculaire des exercices de la gymnastique usuelle. (Bachelard, Volonté, 317)

Instead of going to the gym, I would lie on my couch and try to picture myself as Hercules when he meets Atlas and take his place holding up the Heavens on his shoulders. It would be heavy, but, as Hercules, I would be strong, in my imagination. I would have an iron body. I would practice. I would build an iron imagination. Then, when I am driving through the tunnel of the Fréjus, I would have no problem picturing myself standing in the middle of the road and holding up the collapsing vault. I could do it with one hand. Compared to the Heavens, the Mont Blanc is really nothing.

Bachelard devises an imaginary therapy for elemental fears. The therapy is not psychoanalysis. It consists in building a body in imagination, not exactly an iron body, because an iron body would drown in water. One needs a body that can fly like a bird, and swim, or even better, sleep in the waves like a shark, a body that is element-proof, a body that is able to resist against, or negotiate with, the elements. It requires practice, daily exercises. One must educate, or redress, one's imagination, and literally build in imagination a new body, a new being who, like Hercules, can cope with all the elements. Bachelard describes at length how one may learn flying in imagination.

However, I do not think Bachelard's imaginary exercises can be practiced while idly lying on the couch. They require some effort. They cannot simply take place in the imagination. At least not inside the mind. These imaginary exercises must take place in the outside, with real words. Words resist our will. Who has not imagined the best story in the world that crumbled to pieces when it came to be put into words? There, in words, one can exercise. Bachelard's therapy is telling stories: telling stories about how to negotiate with the emptiness, and water, and even beasts.

Then, it is becoming an imorg. An imorg like a cyborg. An imaginary organism instead of a cybernetic organism. The first cyborg, in Kline and Clynes' seminal paper of 1961, is a human who adapts herself through technical means in order to survive in various environments for which her body was not devised. In space, she builds for herself petro-lungs which she carries as a backpack. One pours petrol in the petro-lungs and these extract oxygen from the petrol which they send directly into the blood. The imorg does not need these cumbersome devices. She has transformed her body in her imagination so as to survive in any atmosphere, whatever the elements, whether she is surrounded by air, or water, or earth, even fire. As long as there is no danger.