Imagination Is Real

Restoring imagination to its rightful place

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. Not in the ordinary way — or perhaps in the most ordinary way, which we tend to dismiss too quickly. When I imagined something frightening in my bedroom at night, it was there. I could feel it. My nervous system responded to it. The thing I had imagined was, in every physiological sense, present.

The same faculty that made my nights difficult made my days rich. The same capacity for vivid, sensory, full-body imaginative experience that filled my bedroom with things that weren't there also fueled my creativity, my curiosity, my interior life. I didn't understand then that these were the same thing. I do now.

Imagination isn't what we think it is. And misunderstanding it costs us more than we realize.

Not a visual faculty

The first misunderstanding is that imagination is primarily visual. We talk about picturing things, about mental images, about the mind's eye. But imagination is not a visual faculty. It is a perceptual one — and it operates across all the senses.

Anything we can perceive, we can imagine. Sound, smell, taste, touch — all of it is available to the imagination, not just sight. Close your eyes and imagine biting into a lemon. Something happens in your mouth. Imagine running your hand across rough concrete. Something happens in your fingertips. Imagine a sound you find deeply calming, or one that sets your teeth on edge. Your body responds.

This is imagination — not as a diminished version of sensory experience, but as a parallel channel through which experience arrives. Full-bodied, multi-sensory, and real in the only sense that ultimately matters: the nervous system treats it as real.

The snake and the rope

Here is a useful example. You walk into a dark room and see something coiled on the floor. For a fraction of a second, before your brain has finished processing what it's seeing, you imagine a snake. Your body responds immediately — heart rate, breath, the particular quality of alertness that threat produces. Then the light catches it differently and you see it's a rope. Your body settles.

The rope was never a snake. But your nervous system responded to the snake as fully as it would have to an actual one. The imagined thing and the real thing produced identical physiological responses.

This is not a glitch. It's a feature. The nervous system doesn't wait for certainty before responding to threat — it responds to the representation. To what is being imagined or perceived in the moment. The body cannot tell the difference between a vividly imagined experience and a real one, because from the body's perspective, there is no difference. Both are real. Both are happening now.

Why this matters clinically

Once you understand this, a lot of things that seem mysterious about trauma become clear.

A traumatic memory isn't just a thought about something that happened. It's an imaginative experience — multi-sensory, embodied, vivid — that the nervous system treats as present. The person isn't remembering danger. They're experiencing it, right now, through the imagination. The body is responding to the representation as if the threat is here, in this room, immediate.

This is why talking about trauma often isn't enough. You can construct a perfectly coherent cognitive account of what happened and why it's over, and the body will go on responding as if it isn't. Because the body isn't listening to the account. It's responding to the imaginative experience, which hasn't changed just because the understanding has.

It's also why imagination is the medium through which trauma heals, not just the medium through which it persists. In EMDR, we work with memories as imagined experiences — held in the body, felt across the senses, present in the room. We don't analyze them from a distance. We enter them, carefully and at a pace the nervous system can tolerate, and allow something to shift from within.

Resourcing — one of the foundations of trauma therapy — is entirely imaginative. The safe place a client develops isn't a real place. It's an imagined one. But the body responds to it as real, which means the safety it produces is real. The calm, the groundedness, the sense of support — these aren't pretend. They're generated through imagination and received by the nervous system as genuine experience.

What we lose when we dismiss it

We live in a culture that treats imagination as the opposite of reality. Childish. Impractical. Something to grow out of. The word itself has become faintly pejorative — to say something is "just imagined" is to say it doesn't count.

But if the nervous system cannot distinguish between an imagined experience and a real one, then what we imagine is, in the most practical sense, shaping our reality. The things we picture, the scenarios we rehearse, the futures we can or cannot conceive — these aren't decorations on top of real life. They are part of how real life is constructed and experienced.

Imagination is the faculty through which we sense what is invisible — possibility, memory, fear, hope, the not-yet. It is not less than perception. It is a form of it.

The child in the dark bedroom wasn't being irrational. She was perceiving something through the most honest instrument available to her. What exactly she was perceiving is a more complicated question — one that different frameworks, from the psychological to the spiritual, answer differently. But that something was being perceived, and that it was real in the way that mattered most — in the body, in the nervous system, in the experience of the moment — that much I no longer doubt.