The Lost Art of Childhood Make-Believe
When we were children, imagination was effortless.
A stick could be a sword, a ship, or a wand. A tree could be a castle, a friend, or a dragon in disguise.
We didn’t think about creating worlds. We lived in them.
Then one day, someone said the magic words: “That’s not real.”
And just like that, make-believe was demoted to the realm of childhood. Something to outgrow, file away, or get serious about.
Play became productivity. Imagination, replaced by imitation.
But here’s the quiet truth: the human mind never stops rehearsing possibilities.
Every day, we imagine the future, predict outcomes, replay memories, and invent meanings. Brain systems involved in remembering and imagining overlap, with the default mode network contributing to aspects of this inward storytelling.
What we called “pretending” as children was also practice in creation: weaving experience out of possibility.
Through play, we tried on roles, tested ideas, and explored feelings in situations we could change. Psychologist Lev Vygotsky treated imaginative play as an important part of development, a place where children could act beyond the limits of their everyday roles.
When we lose touch with that playful state, life can start to feel heavy, as though imagination belongs only to artists or dreamers.
But imagination is woven through ordinary life. It helps us consider another person’s perspective, rehearse a conversation, invent something, or picture a way forward.
Reclaiming imagination is about remembering our ability to participate in what comes next.
Pre-Tending: The Original Creative State
When we were told to stop pretending, perhaps we missed another way to hear the word.
Pre-tending: tending to what hasn’t yet taken form.
That’s my playful reading of it. A way of giving attention to a possibility before asking it to become something.
To pre-tend is to rehearse possibility.
The child piloting a cardboard spaceship and the adult mentally rehearsing a performance are both exploring something before doing it.
Research on motor imagery shows that imagining and performing an action can involve overlapping neural processes. Mental rehearsal can contribute to preparation, alongside physical practice and feedback.
It doesn’t mean the imagined experience is identical to doing it. But it gives substance to something we already recognize: we can practice before we move.
The musician hears a phrase before playing it. The athlete rehearses a movement. We run a difficult conversation through our minds before knocking on the door.
Make-believe has grown up with us, even if we’ve stopped calling it that.
The child exploring a jungle and the adult rehearsing a new skill both remind us of imagination as preparation. A bridge between possibility and participation.
Play and the Experience of Flow
Sometimes that playful involvement becomes deep enough that we stop watching ourselves do it.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow: absorption in an activity, often when challenge and skill are well matched. Attention gathers. Time feels different. We’re in the doing.
Play and flow aren’t the same thing, but they can meet.
A musician disappears into a song. A child forgets the room around their invented world. Someone making something looks up and discovers the afternoon has gone.
We don’t need a list of brain chemicals to recognize the experience.
Play gives us permission to explore before we know whether we’re any good. To make a mess, follow an odd association, or discover that the idea we started with wasn’t the interesting one.
Sometimes it helps us work. Sometimes its value is that we’ve stopped turning every moment into work.
Breakthroughs can arrive on walks, in showers, or while daydreaming. The mind has room to wander beyond the route we’ve been forcing it down.
Play reopens the loop that school and work often close: exploration before achievement.
Curiosity gets to move before it has to justify itself.
Imagination and the Reality We Experience
If childhood play is practice for life, imagination is one of the rehearsal spaces we keep using.
Predictive accounts of brain function explore how expectations help shape perception. We bring what we’ve learnt to what we encounter. That helps us navigate, but it can also make a familiar interpretation feel like the only one available.
We’re meeting a world that exists beyond us, through a perspective shaped partly by experience.
When we imagine an action, some of the systems involved in movement can become active. When we consider someone else’s experience, we draw on several processes involved in understanding people. When we anticipate tomorrow, memory helps supply the material for possible futures.
You could call imagination nature’s simulator.
It lets us try a possibility without requiring the outside world to become it first.
That opens a philosophical question too: how much of the reality we live within is shaped by the stories we bring to it?
Our expectations influence what we notice. Our interpretations influence what we feel able to attempt. Shared stories influence what a culture builds, rewards, and calls normal.
Those effects are real without needing to claim that thought creates the universe.
Imagination can change the relationship between what is happening and what we believe is possible.
And right where those possibilities meet the felt, living body is what I call the creative interface.
The Creative Interface
The body is where an imagined possibility can become felt.
A tightening in the chest. A flutter in the gut. A lift behind the eyes. The thought of a conversation can bring tension before the conversation happens. A remembered kindness can soften a moment.
The relationship moves both ways. Sensations influence our interpretations, and interpretations can influence how we feel.
Yet we can become so occupied with analyzing thoughts that we overlook the experience underneath them.
Coming back through the body gives us another place to begin.
In my training with hypnotist David Snyder, I encountered an imagery exercise often called the Spinning Technique.
It begins by noticing how a feeling seems to show up in the body. A heaviness, a knot, a sense of movement.
Then come questions such as:
If this had a colour, what would it be?
If it moved, which direction would it spin?
A person might imagine placing that representation outside themselves, as though they could observe it in front of them.
The distance can offer a different relationship with the feeling:
This is something I’m experiencing. It isn’t the whole of me.
From there, imagination becomes play. The colour, movement, direction, or texture might change. The person notices what happens and decides whether to continue.
Some people see vivid pictures. Others work with words, sound, movement, or a felt sense. There is no need to manufacture an image to do imagination “properly.”
The exercise is an example of using imagery to explore experience. Research on imagery and hypnosis does not establish that this particular technique reliably reorganizes the nervous system, or that every person will experience a shift.
But the human possibility is worth noticing.
We can experiment with how we represent a feeling. We can discover whether another perspective gives us room. We remain the ones deciding what fits.
That movement, from being caught in an experience to being able to observe it, is part of what I mean by awareness in action.
Sovereignty matters here. A method is an invitation. The person’s experience gets the final word.
Through this lens, imagination becomes a conversation involving thought, sensation, attention, and choice.
Sometimes, in that meeting place, the system finds enough room to stop bracing and start playing.
The human being becomes a living work of art. Still unfinished. Still responding. Still able to try another stroke.
Remembering the Pre-Tender Within
When we begin imagining with attention to our experience, something can shift.
The world doesn’t suddenly change. But our relationship with it may.
The edges of certainty loosen. What felt like concrete develops a little give.
This is the quiet artistry of a pre-tender: someone who tends to possibilities before they exist.
Someone who plays forward what could be, testing shapes, sounds, words, and sensations. Listening for what fits, and remaining willing to revise.
The pre-tender doesn’t have to force an outcome. They explore. They ask what feels alive, what deserves attention, and what might be possible beyond the first explanation.
That’s the secret we forgot when we stopped playing.
Imagination wasn’t something we grew out of. It was a skill we were supposed to grow into.
It helps us meet other people, invent, rehearse, and discover. A bridge between sensing and shaping.
To live as a pre-tender is to stay in dialogue with possibility.
To remember our author-ity in the unfolding story, while remaining attentive to the world that answers back.
And to play again, bringing a little more possibility into the reality we share.
References
Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K. C. R., Spreng, R. N., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(11), 718–731.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Decety, J., & Grèzes, J. (2006). The power of simulation: Imagining one’s own and others’ behavior. Brain Research, 1079, 4–14.
Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the flow experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746–761.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
Gallese, V. (2007). Before and below ‘theory of mind’: Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 659–669.
Jeannerod, M. (2001). Neural simulation of action: A unifying mechanism for motor cognition. NeuroImage, 14(1), S103–S109.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97.
David Snyder’s teaching website: https://www.davidsnydernlp.com/
The Human Story of Belief
We inherit stories. We practice them, share them, and sometimes mistake them for the only reality available. But we can also notice them, question them, and imagine what we might choose to pass on.
Sue McKenzie 15 October 2025 Updated September 2026