One definition of what separates us from other species is our ability to construct narratives from our random thoughts, memories, and imaginings. We are a species of storytellers. […] One common thread in the research is that stories help us make sense of our lives.  (Psychology Today, 2017)

Folk tales emerge in times of upheaval, and from societies’ grimmest moments. They enable us to process and assimilate extreme experience, and deal with our fears.  (The Guardian, 2017)

But oral traditions have not disappeared. Their settings may change, but their power and use remain. The image of an oral telling may be caught on paper, film or in digital format, but recordings are not the word shared live. The presence of teller and audience, and the immediacy of the moment are not fully captured by any form of technology. (The Guardian, 2010)

Storytelling traditions vary all over the world, yet have many things in common. […] Many people today are rediscovering the pleasures of telling stories, after their culture has lost most of its traditional storytelling, yet cannot easily find out much about the countless millennia of oral traditions with all their wisdom and techniques. (Tim Sheppard, 2012)

Many of the tenets of Surrealism, including an emphasis on automatism, experimental uses of language, and found objects, had been present to some degree in the Dada movement, […] Surrealists systematized these strategies within the framework of psychologist Sigmund Freud’s theories… (MoMA)

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. […] It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. (Illuminations, 1936)