Imagination

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I pretend like a giant snake slithers into my room, and that I have to lay perfectly still or else it'll see me and eat me, or something. I always lay perfectly still and imagine it look around my room, fork its tongue a little bit, then leaves my room.

There's this Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin and Hobbes dig looking for dinosaur fossils. They dig and find trash, that they think are dinosaur bones. They glue them together, and imagine what the dinosaur looked like. I remember specifically a soda bottle was the head. The bottle made a whistling sound, which they thought was the dinosaur's noise it used to make. Calvin showed the dinosaur bones to his mom, but she took it for what it was: glued trash.

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"I feel like a prisoner in my own house. I've lost myself."

"Have you heard back yet from grad school?"

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So I was walking with a 5 year old client, and we passed a cemetery. He wanted to stop and look at it. We both stopped and looked at the tombstones for a little while. I assumed he was having some deep, introspective moment about death, and how important life is.

"What place is this?"

"It's a cemetery."

"What's it for?"

"It's where you go when you die. You're buried underground".

"And then you become a zombie?"

"......yup. You become a zombie."

It's amazing how we perpetually escape the real world, and spend time in our imagination. We fill in blanks, create endings, and imagine beginnings by playing God in our own minds. I think we do it because the world can be dull, and we enjoy changing things up. I like to think that we never lose our imagination, but I have a feeling we tend to dismiss it as we grow older. The ridiculous just starts to seem... ridiculous.

I don't think you become mature when you use your imagination less. I think you become mature when you can distinguish your imagination from what's real, and utilize your imagination as a gift from nature to make your life as exciting as you want it to be.