Imagination is both a survival tool and a training platform
When you were a child, you may have had an imaginary friend — or just a fantasy of someone existing and being there when needed?
You played with dolls or teddy bears, or you put some kind of soul into other toys — “Now this one drives to the garage and then comes another one, and they crash…” — you may have heard something like that from boys playing with their toy cars (or you remember it from yourself?)
The game of life
Toy souls are not always as elaborate as imagined friends, as they are often for one-time use, so to speak — just part of the game right now — where the friend is a lasting game.
Playing is practicing. Children learn how to do and how to talk in a variety of areas while playing, and they develop appropriate thoughts and reactions, emotions and expressions — ready to use when life becomes real for them along the way.
Some people continue this line when they grow up, spending much of their time technically alone, but with so much inspiration from the books they read, assisted by their own imagination superpower, that they develop a kind of friendship with the book characters.
Not as weird as it may sound to some, as we humans are fundamentally social, and we have the skill to play and imagine a world of social interactions that isn’t completely real but close enough — it could have been real — so we continue along a stream of thoughts that will let us live through the world of this imagined reality, this way training for when it really one day appears.
Real imagination for life
Writers do that a lot. Even if they are aware of their characters being only present in the writing, they still develop a familiarity with these characters that spawns all sorts of emotions along with the “life” developing for them in the book.
Diary/journal writers sometimes see their diary as a trusted friend and speak to it as such. Having such a friend has saved the lives of many, writing their way out of a depressed situation — to their trusted, imaginary friend, their diary.
It lets them tell all those things that cannot be told to a real friend, either because it is too intimate or secret, too strange or chocking, or because there is no real friend to tell it to.
When you are writing like this, or when imagining that a book character, whether you are writing or reading about it, is a real person, you are simply still playing — the child in you never vanishes, it is forever part of you, forever helping you to imagine situations, people, reactions, etc., forever training you for any imagined future, forever being a valve for letting out the pressure of unfamiliar or unwanted emotions.
Imagined friends have some advantages, one being simply that they are there when needed, you do not need to find them first, you just make them up. Another is that they are listening, obviously, to what you say to them, and you can trust them 100% to keep the secrets you share with them.
Real friends
Perhaps the real difference between friends from real life and the imagined ones is that the real ones have a life that is bigger than what you share with them — they are not 100% dedicated to you, and they expect you to be for them what you expect them to be for you.
A real-life friend is more like a tree in the park that you can visit and enjoy but has a different life than yours, only with moments shared now and then.
Real you
Your imagination is also real. It is part of that real, existing person that fills up an important part of the time-space continuum, that the universe wouldn’t be the same without — part of important you. It is just as valuable as the rest of you, as the rest of your life, the rest of the existence of everything.
Taking in value from your surroundings, including books, and appreciating it is a great skill to have.
You have it — your life-long ability to make friends, literally make them, whenever needed, shows how capable you are of finding and acknowledging positive input in any place, any situation.
You are real. Your imagination is real. Your imagined friends are real. Each one different from the other, and different from physical friends, who themselves are different — and available only as interferences in time and space, as moments of value.
These moments are as precious as you are able to sense them. They are in you, part of you. The friendship is your sensation of it. As great as you see it, as lasting as you remember it, as true as you want it.
Photo by Roberto Nickson at Pexels
