Imagine worlds

Do you remember that day not all that many years ago when you stared out of the window just dreaming? It might have been a Sunday or maybe it was one of those convenient government holidays. You didn’t have any work and there weren’t any grownups bothering you with chores. Mom had just given you a bowl of something wonderful to eat. The sun was bright and cheerful but it wasn’t hot. There might have been a breeze that that day; that made the curtains swing and cast an odd drama of subtle shadows across the room. And you were lost in a world of your own. It wasn’t any tiny variation on this mundane world – which we imagine all the time, it’s human nature, project our desires of what was and what we wish were onto a virtual world. No, it was something else all together. The universe was dough for your mind to kneed, there were no rules, no things imposed on that true, pure freedom.

I imagined worlds full of wonderful things and staggeringly beautiful impossibilities. Of factions so strange intertwined in war and life. Of toy soldiers brought to life, following rules so bizarre and of beings my mind can barely think about now. I’m sure you did too. Maybe nothing similar in any concrete terms, except perhaps for their sheer differentness, but I’m sure you did. Our minds were unfettered then. We did not impose any rules upon ourselves.

Think about that. Our imagination can’t be fettered and shackled by anything outside. Not by anything that we have yet built at any rate. We do not imagine what we could because we will ourselves not to. We tell ourselves that it is childish, perhaps. We tell ourselves that it has not ‘purpose’, perhaps (As if all we do is only for some ‘purpose’ – hah!). We tell ourselves that many things that may or may not be either overtly or through some corrupted sub-conscious. But, the thing is, we just truly do not imagine any more.

Take my case: I write and I dream more that most I know. But my worlds are normal. They work and they think the same except in extremes of circumstance and in magnitude. They are just the normal world magnified and stylized in the parts I find interesting. But there is nothing truly new about them. I somehow try (perhaps not ‘try’ but in any case I do it to myself) to limit myself to more normal things.

It is our imagination which drove us to be what we are. The imagination which led some ancient Pharaoh to see pyramids where there are none or an architect to imagine ancient Rome where all he saw was a river bank. We do not forsake our imagination, we can’t – that would be as absurd as forsaking thought itself. No, we bind it and lock it in a cage of our making to serve the bidding we decide is ‘best’ for it. Imagine where we would be if we didn’t.