Respecting the imaginary: a thread. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that there’s something important going on in our culture around the real and the imaginary. It’s important because, as we know, denying/minimising truth can be deadly. If you let it be a mere detail...

whether or not the powerful are lying, then you’re in trouble. But there’s another side, which is about denying the importance of the imaginary. I think, for humans to be well, they have to have space in which to imagine. That is certainly true for me. And when I say ‘space’ I...

mean space that is respected. When we minimise the importance of the imaginary, the fantasy, we run the risk of backing people into stifling psychological corners. One risk is that they will feel that the only way to claim space for what is struggling to breathe in them is to...

say, ‘it’s real!’ But this will never do. Because the imaginary wants its own place in us. It needs to live in the flickering, soft spaces of ourselves. If you drag it into the world and slap on a concrete jacket of ‘real’, you run the risk of killing it and, simultaneously...

creating a dead weight to carry. So, what does it mean to create respected space for imagination? I wish I knew. Perhaps it’s a respecting of the solitary, the slow, of loose and undirected time. Perhaps it is in learning to value the process of imagination as much as any...

material outcome. I don’t know. But I think we hit serious problems when we devalue the imaginary, either by just straightforwardly mocking it, or by attempting to ‘elevate’ it into the real. That’s not elevation. We should venerate it for what it truly is - precious dreaming.