"I am about to die," Takahisa Ide, 17, tells the camera. On his lap is a simple crayon drawing freshly made to illustrate the scene.

"It was in the future, but it didn't feel like Earth. Next to me was maybe my child or someone who was very close to me..." "Tell me about dying. How did it feel?" his interviewer asks. "It looked like I was really happy, content," Ide says, smiling. "What was the person near you doing?" "Just watching over me." "Having seen that, how do you feel now?" "It would be wonderful if it turned out this way," he says.

Ide may have been surprised to find that he could visualize his old age -- and dying contented -- so clearly, but his interviewer wasn't. Lisa Morgan designed The 17s Project, in which Ide was participating for the interview, to help young people unlock their imaginations and explore the future.

Morgan, a certified teacher whose career history has focused on advertising and communications, and photographer Caroline Parsons (both British women based in Japan) began the project in 1998. It consists of a one- or two-day workshop in which participants, teens ages 16 to 18, are guided by Morgan on a mind journey through time. With the subject's consent, Parsons takes photographs and videos of their exercises, plus anything else they might want to record, for a planned television documentary.

To date, Morgan and Parsons have worked with more than 100 teenagers in Wales, England, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, Australia, Japan and Thailand.

With much recent attention devoted in the media to the junanasai mondai -- the rise in brutal, criminal acts committed by 17-year-olds -- The 17s Project has become increasingly relevant. Bypassing the communication gap between teenagers and their parents, teachers and even psychologists, it taps into what may be troubling young people by giving them a chance to look inside themselves and voice their discoveries.

To help them do this, Morgan teaches a visualization technique for accessing their own conscious and unconscious expectations of how the future will be. The teens reveal only as much as they want and need not rationalize their responses; the interviewer makes no judgments.

The technique is deceptively simple. But because Morgan withholds answers as well as judgment, her questions encourage the teens to rely on their own intuition and help them to gain insight into their personal concerns, visualize future work, and even come up with creative solutions to global problems.

"In our work with teenagers, we show them the capacity they have within themselves to answer their own questions," Morgan says.

For Ide, what was built over the course of the day's workshop was an image of his ideal future and the confidence to follow his dreams.

"What I learned was to really believe in what I believe at each given moment," he says.

"One of the tools I came up with some years ago and use in The 17s workshops is an imaginary 'Book of Time,' in which people see pages of the future," Morgan says. "If they don't like what they first see, they can 'rewrite' the pages. In this way they create the future they want."

Since The 17s Project began, Morgan and Parsons have received grants for their work from Honda Motor Co. and the Mitsubishi Bank Foundation, as well as support from schools and educational nongovernmental organizations. But they shoulder the bulk of the costs themselves. "This really is a lifework for both of us," Parsons explains.

"The 17s [are] a pivotal age," says Morgan. "You're no longer a child and yet not quite part of the adult world, but you have fully developed faculties. A huge amount of hormones are running through you. And you're under this stress to be reasonable, to behave in a rational manner.

"We've devalued our imagination to the point where if people express something that isn't rational, they become marginalized. That's what happens to some 17-year-olds. They've been told that they're not normal."

The 17s Project puts all labels aside to focus on putting teenagers' minds to work and helping them form a better understanding of and appreciation for their own inner guides.

"In school, we're taught that human beings are reasonable, but we're not. We're much more than is ever acknowledged," Morgan says. "Our choices are based on our intuitive sense, and then we support that gut feeling with rational reasons."

Formal education teaches young people to rely on just one aspect of their minds, says Morgan, devaluing all the other resources at their disposal.

Morgan says she believes that the key to accessing inner wisdom begins with direct experience of that wisdom. And that's what The 17s Project is really about.

"These 17-year-olds learn that they have something magical inside them," Morgan says. "This work is about each individual respecting their intuitive sense more. We're not asking them to reveal their innermost secrets. We're not searching for their conflicts at home. Because it's the world of the imagination we're talking about, they can speak freely.

"They don't know what's coming," Morgan continues. "People find out about themselves and get insights they didn't know they were capable of having. The sessions are seedbeds of new ideas, inventions and concepts. [These teens] are at a point in their lives where they can apply the work [from these workshops] tomorrow. If they make a decision, they can act on it."