Werble on imagination and reality.
There's a whole load of stuff I can dream up on my own. Swathes of it.
But other stuff I can't - unless the wind is NNW. It's like the card game 'Once Upon A Time' - you see the pictures but sometimes you can accept the story and sometimes you can't.
Three brief examples.
1) There's a meekle book called Just In Case by Meg Rossoff. ('How I Live Now' is also a brilliant book by her.)
The main character has an imaginary dog. At some point, due to feeling low, he no longer believes the dog is with him. It takes another character saying 'I thought I saw your dog in the garden - come look...' for him to be able to 'find' his dog again.
2) Ages ago I had a dream where I was in a land suffused with magic, fighting an evil dictator. I was supposed to be a 'chosen one'. However, whilst all the natives of the land could fly, throw fire balls etc on a whim, I couldn't. I just couldn't believe in it. But then I worked out that if I made runes, wore talismans, cast sigils, that was a thing I could whole-heartedly believe in... and I became very kick-arse indeed.
3) I've had long conversation with Vincent van Gogh. And he told me a lot of stuff that was perfectly accurate and I must have picked up from somewhere because I sure as hell don't remember knowing it. But the point is, I couldn't have summoned him on my own. But I believed it when a friend said she was sending him. Or rather I didn't really believe it but then he turned up anyway.
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....As you get older, as you file away more examples of what is 'possible' and what is 'impossible', your imagination wanes. It becomes less instinctive to assign personalities to objects, or to believe toys and oddments are sentient guardians. You might still do such things, but it's more of a conscious act of will than an inherant gnostic knowledge.
In my case, I think my neurons have been sneaky. They recognised that the more of solid reality I lived through the more my ideas of possibility would wane. So they saved all my extra-charged-animated-belief in secret cupboards. Cupboards which could only be accessed with the right key - because that was logic, right?
Wave-a-wand magic is silly.
But a spell done right, that's just like shoddy quantum, that totally works.
Dead/fictional/fictional-dead people cannot turn up in my flat to demand tea or bitch at me.
But if a friend I believe sends them to me, then of course they'll turn up.
I can call up the Darkhalf, the Wraithwitch, CheeseApple, Bedlam or a host of other entities because they are definitely part of me. But I understand that for someone else to meet them it would be a lot easier if I *sent* them.
.....
Feh - once upon a time I maybe had a point. But it's lost in the neuronic jabber.
I think actually I was gonna write a post about how I desperately want to order a kitten by post...
How if I could order a dragon by post I totally would...
And how actually I should never be allowed money.
'Cos I spend it.
But on the other hand, all I did was buy a silver antique vesta case.
It's not like I bought drugs. Or a raptor. Or a nuke. Or a kitten (-my father would likely consider this worse than the other three.)
I'm a well behaved Corvid. Oh yes.
Still.
Erm.
If anyone knows where I can get a small and meekle child of Bast - black for preference - or if anyone fancies sending me a kitten (or dragon) by post - my neurons would be unbelievably bouncy and grateful.
That was probably really my point.
And if it wasn't, it totally is now.