The Importance of Imagination
© Virginia Marin
Close your eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to live in a world devoid of imagination? Where would man be today had not someone in eons past had a visual impression of the wheel? Of a house? Of talking with someone over time and space? When, among man, did that first spark of fire translate into cooked food? Everything we have and know today stems from someone's imagination.
What IS this thing called imagination? Imagination is the power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality. It is a creative ability or mental capacity for experiencing, constructing and manipulating mental images.
Imagination is responsible for the entire range of fantasy, original and insightful thought and sometimes for a much wider range of mental activities dealing with, for example, Hey,let's suppose..., and pretending.
Deep in the human mind are buried, and waiting for the proper time to surface, ideas that will benefit humankind. Imagination? Without imagination man would still be...well, that also takes imagination!
Tremendous stores of imagination went into the making of folk literature. Consider the timeless masterpieces such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid; the plays of the Great dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes--as well as the great folk tales of the Grimm Brothers and the retelling of the Faust legend by Goethe.
The great Bruno Bettelheim applied the psycho-analytic model of human personality to folk tales. Bettelheim theorized that images bombard the conscious, preconscious and unconscious mind forming the structure of folk tales.
Using the images throughout this paper, you can structure your daydreams and imagination into a fantasy tale. That's right! Choose an image and let your imagination take over. Then express yourself in one, or more, of the following ways: drawing, acting, recitation or writing.
Drawing, of course, includes any art medium, such as building a castle with found bits and pieces. Acting could be expressed in a mime presentation or constructing puppets. Memorizing Nursery Rhymes, legends or folk tales falls under recitation. Using images from Middle Earth or the Hobbit is a good starter, too. Writing needs but a pen and paper, your computer and imagination.
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