Imaginary Worlds are a Sign of Creativity and Intelligence in Children
“Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso
Many children create fantasy worlds to inhabit, and this type of play can become evident from the age of about two years old.
According to Lisa Natcharian (2016):
About 1 in 30 children will continue to develop this activity into an extremely elaborate world of their own design.
We’re not talking about a few Lego buildings for their Superman figure to leap or hunt villains among, but a completely new world shaped from their imagination, with its own maps and territories, social rules and activities, and perhaps even a language.
Over the course of months or years, these children will return again and again to this world, playing inside it, and continuing to add to it in a very focused and determined way. It’s a bit like a Dungeons & Dragons game, but without rules.
Authors Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Lewis, and Gertrude Stein, actor Peter Ustinov, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart all left evidence of childhood worldplay.
The most well-documented pretend world was created by the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and their brother Bronwell. “Great Glass Town” was their capital of “Verdopolis,” an imaginary African country.
Beginning with toy soldiers whose military campaigns the siblings controlled, the pretend world expanded and flourished into a completely realized civilization, with hundreds of imaginary citizens (with storylines), landscapes (with illustrations), and accessories (including magazines the children produced).
“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” Carl Jung
Famous Writers Who Created Fantasy Worlds as Children
Detailed imaginary worlds are also called paracosms.
Some famous writers are recorded as having paracosms.
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities. Dr. Seuss
The novelist C.S. Lewis and his brother created a paracosm called Boxen which they created by combining their fantasy worlds called Animal-Land and India.
C.S. Lewis famous book The Chronicles of Narnia with its depictions of the fantasy land of Narnia was created by him drawing upon his paracosm of Animal-Land.
J.R.R. Tolkien had created the highly detailed fantasy world Middle-earth which he depicted in his books The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He wrote about the fact he had been inventing languages since his early teens, and then, later on, he imagined the people who spoke the languages and the worlds they would inhabit.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities. Maya Angelou
Childhood Fantasy World Indicative of Intelligence & Creativity
A Michigan State University study undertaken by Root-Bernstein revealed that many MacArthur Fellows Program recipients had paracosms as children, thus engaging in what she calls worldplay.
Sampled MacArthur Fellows were twice as likely to have engaged in childhood worldplay as Michegan State University (MSU) undergraduates.
They were also significantly more likely than MSU students to recognize aspects of worldplay in their adult professional work.
Indeed, paracosm play is recognized as one of the indicators of a high level of creativity, which educators now realize is as important as intelligence.
In an article in the International Handbook on Giftedness, Root-Bernstein writes about paracosm play in childhood as an indicator of considerable creative potential.
“I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.” Lady Gaga
Childhood Trauma and Imagination
It is not uncommon for trauma to also cause children to retreat to a fantasy world or their imagination.
According to Harris, P. (2000). in his book The work of the imagination, “Children can engage in the creation of imaginative alternatives to reality from their very early years.”
According to contemporary psychoanalytical terminology, trauma “is an event in an individual’s life that is defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization” (Laplanche and Pontalis 465).
Richard Lejkowski in his 2012 thesis Childhood Trauma and the Imagination in American Literature states that:
Children who undergo trauma often use “imagination as a partner to help cope with the situation.”
In my own childhood experience, it was the lack of connection and the painful reality of my real world that stimulated the creation of a fantasy world.
Loss of Mother
It has been nearly 20 years since I left the Jehovah’s Witness (JW) religion of my childhood and my mother cut me off and treated me as if dead.
She is still alive, but not to me.
In my heart, as a little child, I had longed for her as a mother in a different way than she was, long before she cut me off.
Fantasy World
I created an alternate fantasy world in my mind from as far back as I can remember.
My brother and I were systematically sexually abused by our paternal grandfather up until I was approximately nine years old. No one knew it was happening.
Escaping into my fantasy world had started in Australia when I was about five years old when I used to lie on my bed and fly off into an imaginary world with the Peter Pan and Wendy characters depicted on my curtains.
- Sometimes, in my fantasy, I used to substitute Peter Pan and Wendy for real people, like my Nana or anyone else I had met who smiled at me or seemed kind.
- Sometimes they were characters from television that became a substitute family and reality for me.
- I created a fantasy family.
The fact I created a fantasy mother and father doesn’t mean my Mum and Dad were not good people. They did what they thought was best for my brother and me at the time.
I don’t know why they didn’t appear in my internal world, which was a safe alternate reality for me.
Perhaps it was because I already had them in real life, and it didn’t stop bad things from happening.
I couldn’t find safety in my real world, and they were already in that, and so I had to create somewhere where I could guarantee I could be a hundred percent safe always.
In my make-believe world, I was more connected to the people in it than with what was happening around me.
I would substitute people I had read about in books or seen on television or in real life and place myself in the middle of my imaginary scene.
We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay. Lynda Barry
Common Themes in My Make-Believe World
There were common themes I would work through and experience there.
There was nearly always a mother figure who loved me dearly and would never forsake me.
- Often I would be naughty or have a problem for which I might face rejection.
- The problem would be resolved, and I was dealt with lovingly.
- I would be forgiven, accepted and there was always a happy ending.
- Sometimes this happened with a fantasy father figure as well.
Television
My Dad used to hire a television for us to watch over the wintertime, and I would love watching shows such as The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie.
I would substitute the mother Olivia from The Waltons into my fantasy inside world as my inside mum.
Books
I read The Water Babies and fell in love with Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and with Tom (the main character) who spoke of being cuddled and “falling asleep in her arms from pure love.”
When I read the book as a child that phrase “falling asleep in her arms from pure love” lingered in my mind for years. I wondered what that would feel like, and imagined it over and over again.
I dreamt about experiencing that feeling myself.
I loved the books The Faraway Tree and The Enchanted Forest written by Enid Blyton.
Her racist overtones and themes did not make any impression on me as a child (they do now).
What did make an impression was:
- how the children played and had adventures away from controlling adults
- the pure imagination of the fantasy worlds they escaped into
- their experiences in these worlds, and relationships with each other as playmates and friends
These are the things that stayed in my mind and fueled and fed me emotionally over many long hours spent in my bedroom.
There were myriads of other books that I would read and use the scenes and material I read to build into my fantasy world.
They provided plenty of material for me to make stories up in my head so I could experience alternate worlds where I escaped within fantasy.
Inside my Fantasy World — Mother Figure
I knew the central fantasy figure in my mind as Inside Mum.
She was always there for me day and night. She changed face depending on what book I was reading or what television show I was watching.
Sometimes she would stay the same for weeks or months, and then I would change her.
She was the perfect Mum, always hugging, loving and protecting me, full of wisdom, advice, and attention.
If she got angry with me, she forgave me, and if I got mad at her, she always helped me express myself and work out why I felt the way I did.
All the emotions I didn’t feel I could express in my real life, I could express in my fantasy world with this Mum.
Inside Mum stayed permanently with me, and my experience of her was as a real nurturing personality from my earliest memories (at about five years old) until I was approximately forty-four years old.
Every single day I communed with her within my psyche, and often I would be lost in my world with her while doing other activities.
I would sometimes resent being pulled into reality by other people speaking to me.
I would spend hours a day in my world with her, within make-believe scenarios, and every opportunity I had I would retreat and visit with her in my mind, especially if there were activities where I could do work but not have to overthink about what I was doing.
She was an integral and permanent member of my psychological makeup. I could call on her twenty-four hours a day for advice or comfort or tell her something.
She was more real to me than any real person, and she often surprised me with her wisdom and advice.
I would picture her in my mind, and she would start to speak to me or hug me, and what she would come out with would sometimes be something I hadn’t thought of yet myself.
I realize now this was part of my mind speaking to me, but Inside Mum FELT separate from just being a creation of my mind, and her advice often made me feel that this was so.
I only recently realized while looking back at Inside Mum that the Inside Me who interacted with and related to her stayed either at about five years of age or in her early teens.
It was like part of my mind watched both of us (like watching television), and I observed and took away information from our interactions.
The warmth, joy, and comfort I felt inside during these encounters sustained me.
I would take any scenario in real life where I had felt strong emotion (anger or sadness) to Inside Mum and work it out in some scene or other, often entirely different to what was going on in my real life, and in that way, I would process emotion.
Only nobody else ever got to observe or experience it.
Emotionally Stunted
In many ways this made me appear very easy to get along with, but it stopped me from emotionally growing up and developing confidence in dealing with real people and situations.
I never had to experience feeling the emotions of anger, sadness or jealousy with real people.
I shared little of myself with people regarding my real thoughts and feelings. Mostly this was because I was unaware of them myself and had buried so much of what had happened along with my emotions.
Once I had left the religion of my childhood and started talking to a therapist confronting real events from my past, and moving from them being only memories in my internal world to facing them as felt emotions in my adult world, it presented challenges.
Real had always been scary.
I would say the main achievement of my attending psychodynamic therapy besides learning to feel again and then to moderate my emotions was learning to form emotional bonds and connections with real people in the real world that eventually replaced Inside Mum and the Me who lived in my fantasy world.
Replacing my fantasy mum with a greater emotional attachment to real people was not a conscious happening.
I did not know it was going to occur, and the realization when it finally happened — that Inside Mum had disappeared, and I couldn’t conjure her up in the same way anymore — was a huge loss and a distressing time for me.
Therapy
It is hard to describe how the experience changed from feeling like I had no control over what Inside Mum said to me, to my talking to my therapist, a real person, about what was bothering me instead, and transferring to her all the emotional reactions I was having.
I also was gradually building and forming meaningful and emotionally safe interactions with other people.
The formation of these friendships and the experience of showing and feeling emotion when dealing with other people meant I started to interact less and less within my fantasy world.
Gradually the experience of living within me with an Inside Mum subsided to the point where it ceased.
Grieving Loss of Fantasy World and Inside Mum
For a while afterward, I underwent a period of grieving and loss for my Inside Mum who was an integral and necessary part of my psyche for so long, and I missed her terribly.
I would try to imagine her, but the experience had changed, and I knew I just imagined a figure, and it wasn’t the same as it had felt previously. She no longer was real in the same way to me, and she no longer talked to me spontaneously (I never knew what she was going to say).
The spontaneous nature of defaulting to retreating inside my head to a fantasy world stopped.
This process took place over a period of eight years from when I first started to see a therapist until I stopped seeing one.
I used to feel embarrassed and would rarely tell people about my fantasy world that had remained with me into my adult life until I started to form relationships with greater emotional sharing.
I rarely share the facts of it with anyone even now, but I am no longer embarrassed.
The Joy of an Imaginative/Fantasy World
- I see my fantasy world now as a wonderful, unusual coping mechanism created by my brain to help keep my emotions and internal self sane and whole until I reached a point where I was both willing and able to process and deal with past trauma.
- I also can see it helped me to develop introspection, self-awareness, self-healing, and resilience as a child.
- Also, my ability to fantasize and enact out emotional states and scenes between people in my mind helped nurture my creativity.
Although I kept my imaginary world secret due to the nature of keeping secrets in my childhood, most children who develop them act them out in self-play or ‘world-play’ games that others can observe.
They may teach their siblings or friends about their fantasy worlds and engage others in participating in their fantasy.
Instead of seeing imaginary worlds as a fault, defect or something to squash out of children; by an examination of the research, it is clear that it is often a sign of a highly creative and intelligent child.
I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn’t hold me back and my teachers couldn’t criticize me. That’s how my career as a micro-sculptor began. Willard Wigan
At the very least, it is a valued part of your child’s inner world that you are privileged to be able to see and observe.
“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” Albert Einstein
