Painting from the Imagination

For me, painting is always connecting the inside to the outside. But I discovered a very strange thing a few years ago - that I could draw from my imagination and the figures and images were very like the ones I draw from life. This rather freaked me out, as you can imagine. Now I try to trust 'dreaming with the eyes open while holding a paint brush' ... as a valid process to creating that conduit between the world and whatever happens in the inner mind with its strange and beautiful lunacies.