Are speech and imagination "sixth senses"?

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Cover of Jeffrey Kripal's book
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred




"If, however, paranormal phenomena are meaning events the work and look a great deal like texts, then it follows that texts can also work and look a great deal like paranormal phenomena. Writing and reading , that is, can replicate and realize [my emphasis] paranormal processes, just as paranormal processes can replicate and realize textual processes.  This is what I finally mean by the phrase 'authors of the impossible.'  It is also what I am trying to effect with this text." (Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, p. 26)

This passage really struck me.  What do you think he means by it? 

 I think in it (and throughout his book) Kripal is offering some very provocative suggestions for what "the sixth sense" might be. Is it speech, as some have proposed both in the Western intellectual tradition and in non-Western cultures, as David Howe and Constance Classen (whose book on touch we'll be reading) argue? Or is imagination a sixth sense, as actor Paul Giamatti discusses here?

What if he's right, that some how our and others' telling of imaginative stories actually bring those things we're imagining into reality, "replicate and realize them?!

Does that make us all potentially some sort of magical shamans, bringing the phenomena of other dimensions into our limited Flatland-like capacity to sense things in only 4 dimensions?
 

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