Reflections on imagination

To say reflections makes it sound like I have gathered my thoughts and mulled them into a coherent and interesting piece of writing but as an extrovert processor the result of my reflections is nothing more than the jumbled mess in my head splurging onto the page!!

So...

I am either a total loony tune with severe mental health problems or my imagination gets taken control of by external forces. The spiritually sensitive among you will get what I'm saying but to the rest of you I suppose I sound ridiculous. However, this assault on my mind that happens every so often made me start thinking about the imagination.

As children develop we really encourage the imagination and then as children grow up, perhaps go to school we start to tell children where to use the imagination and where not to and also we start to give children an idea of what is appropriate for their imagination to be doing, while at the same time introducing them to movies and other cultural influences that put new stuff in their imagination, good and bad.

By the time children are adults we have a pocket, some larger than others, in our heads which seems to hold our imagination. If an adult is confident in expressing and using their imagination it seems that they can respond to live really creatively so problems in life can be an exciting challenge of thinking 'outside the box' or boredom doesn't become much of a problem because they can go somewhere else in their head. For people who suffer from stress and anxiety, the imagination is used as a tool to help them find a place of rest or calm. So it seems that there are times when it's ok, even encouraged, as an adult to engage your imagination.

Then there seem to be the times when the imagination is seen as the root of problems, so adults who feel dissatisfied because they have unrealised dreams and hopes, or the case where someone has great vision for something and noone takes their idea seriously. The support of the community around that person can bring life or death to that vision. As an entrepreneur I know that I have millions of ideas, some of them ridiculous but others getting close to brilliant(!), and it is because the majority of my community are so supportive that I find myself able to pursue these things, even if that pursuit doesn't move from thought into action. Then there's the way the imagination gets labelled as the root of religious faith, perhaps the idea that God speaks to a person gets blamed on their imagination or for those who are more sensitive to the spiritual 'stuff' they appear to have mental health problems because they describe what feels like an external assault on, or interaction with, their mind. Too often we label people with 'an overactive imagination'.

Or I suppose there is the way our dreams can be so fleeting that we barley remember them in the morning, or so real that when we wake we are confused by what has been happening. I wonder where our imagination is in all of that - how much of our dreams are simply our heads processing the stuff of the day, our worries or hopes. If, then, dreams are not necessarily imagination we should be open to people who have a spiritual experience in their dreams, without writing it off as 'just your imagination'.

Coming back to the journey our imaginations take from childhood to adulthood I wonder how we can be counter-cultural in that with our own children and the children around us. In an age where 6 year old girls want a mobile phone and want to be sexy or worry that their body isn't quite right, I feel that something has gone terribly wrong. I remember at 6 I was living in my imagination a lot of the time. I had no awareness about my body then apart from it's physical capabilities and whether I could climb that tree and make a house up there to hide out in and then all the stuff that might happen in my new life living up in that tree where nobody could find me! or the way my imagination let me own and care for ponies and ride them around and groom them for hours and hours.

if we could be counter-cultural and stop the 'curbing' of our imaginations and our children's imaginations where could we be? a neighbour of ours writes film scripts in his spare time and I hear he lets his imagination dream up awesome things with positive environmental impact. But they stay on the page of paper because as a culture we don't have space for dreaming dreams and letting our imagination run wild. Einstein, who incidentally failed at shchool, only realised his theory of relativity because he was lost in his imagination and got swept up on a beam of light. It was through this 'vision' that he went on to change the face of scientific understanding in many areas.

I suppose my thing then is how do we raise children into adults while retaining the full freedom of their imagination? how do we as adults recover our lost imagination and make the pocket of imagination in our heads so full that a much larger container is required, even better, not even try to contain it!! and lastly how do we as respond to people's claims, like my own, that the imagination can be subject to external forces, particularly in a spiritual sense, so that it is not responding to what the head is saying but seems to be responding to something else altogether - or should I be declared mentally ill?