The Lost Art of 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 came the familiar words: “That’s not real.”
Make-believe became something to outgrow. Play gave way to productivity, and imagination began to sound like a luxury for artists and dreamers.
Yet the mind never stops imagining. We picture tomorrow, rehearse conversations, revisit memories and wonder what someone else might be feeling. Some of the brain systems involved in remembering are also involved in imagining possible futures. What changed wasn’t our capacity. It was our permission to play with it.
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky saw imaginative play as an important part of childhood development. A child trying on a role isn’t simply escaping the world. They’re exploring what they can do within it, with enough freedom to experiment.
What if that skill was never meant to end with childhood?
Pre-Tending to Possibility
When we were told to stop pretending, perhaps we forgot what the word could hold. I like to split it open: pre-tending, tending to something before it has taken form.
A child piloting a cardboard spaceship is trying out a possibility. Adults do this too. We mentally rehearse a difficult conversation, imagine how to move through an unfamiliar place or picture a different ending to a problem we’ve been turning over for days.
Research on motor imagery shows that imagining an action and performing it can involve overlapping brain processes. That doesn’t mean thought replaces physical practice, or that imagining a flight is the same as flying. It means rehearsal can have a place alongside experience.
Pre-tending is a way of asking, What might be possible here? We can try on an idea before committing to it. We can notice how it feels, change it, or set it aside.
That is useful far beyond childhood. It gives curiosity somewhere to go.
Play Without a Productivity Target
As adults, we’re often encouraged to play because it might make us more productive. There may be truth in that, but I don’t want to turn play into another job.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as a state of deep involvement in an activity. Play and flow aren’t identical, though both can draw us into what we’re doing. Time may feel different when we’re absorbed in music, movement, making something or solving a problem for the pleasure of it.
Not every playful moment produces a breakthrough. It doesn’t have to. Play lets us experiment without demanding that each attempt justify itself. We can be curious before we’re competent. We can make a mess, laugh, begin again and discover something we didn’t know we were looking for.
That freedom matters in a world that keeps asking what everything is for.
The Stories We Rehearse
Imagination also has a serious side. We use it to anticipate what might happen next. The brain draws on past experience to make sense of the present and prepare for the future. Sometimes that helps us. Sometimes an old expectation makes a new situation feel smaller than it really is.
If we’ve learnt to expect rejection, imagination can rehearse it before anyone has said a word. If we’ve learnt that a certain role keeps us safe, we may struggle to picture ourselves stepping outside it.
This is where imagination meets awareness. We can notice the scene we’ve already written and ask whether it’s the only one available. We aren’t creating the outside world by thinking differently. Other people and real circumstances still matter. But the story we bring to a moment can affect what we notice, how we feel and what we choose to try.
The imagination that rehearses fear can also rehearse a question, a conversation or a small act of courage.
The Body Is Part of the Story
Imagining doesn’t always mean seeing pictures in the mind. Some people think in images; others sense movement, remember sounds, work with words or simply have a feeling of where an idea could go.
The body can be part of that exploration. A conversation we dread might bring a tight chest. A possibility we hadn’t considered might bring a breath of relief. Those sensations aren’t proof that a choice is right or wrong. They are information we can get curious about.
In my training, I encountered an imagery exercise taught by David Snyder. A person notices a feeling in the body and experiments with giving it a colour, shape or movement. They might imagine placing it at a little distance, changing it, and noticing whether their experience shifts.
You don’t have to picture any of that for the underlying question to be useful: Can I observe this feeling without deciding it is all of me?
An exercise like this is an invitation to experiment, not a promise of transformation. A sensation might change; it might not. Either way, the person doing the noticing remains the one who chooses what happens next.
That’s the part I care about. Imagination can give us a way to relate to an experience, rather than handing the experience the whole story.
Remembering the Pre-Tender Within
The world doesn’t suddenly change because we imagine something new. But we may find another way to meet it. A familiar story loosens. A question appears where certainty used to sit. What felt like concrete begins to have a little give.
The pre-tender doesn’t force an outcome or insist that every possibility must become real. They explore. They listen, test, revise and sometimes laugh at the first attempt.
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.
To live as a pre-tender is to stay in conversation with possibility. We can take reality seriously without treating our first interpretation of it as the final word.
Perhaps that’s where our author-ity begins: in remembering that we can tend to a story before deciding how to live it.
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.
Jeannerod, M. (2001). Neural simulation of action: A unifying mechanism for motor cognition. NeuroImage, 14(1), S103–S109.
Munzert, J., Lorey, B., & Zentgraf, K. (2008). Cognitive motor processes: The role of motor imagery in the study of motor representations. Brain Research Reviews, 60(2), 306–326.
Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., & Buckner, R. L. (2012). Episodic simulation of future events: Concepts, data, and applications. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1235(1), 18–31.
Snyder, D. (n.d.). The Spinning Technique and embodied emotional transformation. NLP Power / David Snyder Hypnosis. https://www.davidsnydernlp.com/
Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97.
Sue McKenzie 15 October 2025 Updated September 2026