How does a person's fantasy work? 5 ways to make your fantasies come true

Fantasy is a quality that anyone wants to have, since a person with imagination is able to creatively solve problems that arise before him, come out of ambiguous situations in an unconventional way, create something new, and creatively present himself to the world. When a person with imagination is adapted to society and knows how to think logically, he is highly effective. Creative people need imagination to give birth to images, embodying them in art.

Fantasy in psychology is an element of imagination, closely related to dreams. Therefore, a person who fantasizes a lot constantly wants something, strives for the objects of his dreams. He is often perceived by those around him as an innovator, an interesting conversationalist, because he is able to come up with new things and make every day different from the rest.

The word “fantasy” comes from a concept in Greek that denotes a phenomenon that has not yet existed in reality. If we fantasize, we form something new in our imagination. People with a strong ability to fantasize also have a strong idea; they change attitudes more easily and experiment, bringing their ideas to life.

What is fantasy?

Fantasy is a product of the imagination, characterized by the strength, vividness, spontaneity and uniqueness of the symbols, images or fantasies it creates. This is a superconcentration of ideas that stimulates learning, arouses a keen interest in everything that surrounds us, and a desire to know it all. According to this, the ability to imagine is the ability to create in the imagination something new, incredible, unimaginable, impossible or irrelevant. It's good that the storehouse of imagination is inexhaustible.

Without imagination, it would be difficult for a person to live with or create reality. After all, everything around us is the result of someone’s imagination, embodied in materials, designs, household appliances, transport, the Internet, books, paintings - in everything. Imagination as a personal quality is necessary for any process, but in creativity it is indispensable. That's why artists, writers, photographers, designers, dancers, stylists value this skill. More often, however, it is called creativity.

But the ability to dream is not only useful for creative people. Fantasies, slips of the tongue, free associations, wrong actions - all this is a direct path to the unconscious. And the unconscious is the subject of psychology. It is not for nothing that Sigmund Freud called fantasies “facades of dreams,” which reflect hidden thoughts, secret desires, and unrealized intentions. True, he recalled, they must be distinguished from reality.

And here lies the ambiguous benefit of fantasy. On the one hand, the development of fantasy increases the ability to create, expand, and double reality. But on the other hand, this is a way to avoid it. Sometimes fantasy becomes a way of life and somehow imperceptibly replaces an essential part of it. And here you need to be careful.

Why do people need imagination and fantasy?

Some people mistakenly believe that imagination and composition are empty pursuits that have no application. But a well-developed imagination is the basis of creative thinking, which is so valued in modern society.

Think about it: we don't just follow our instincts. Instead, we dream, have ambitions, set goals and enjoy the beauty of life. You can't dream if you don't imagine the object of your dreams. So having imagination is what separates humans from animals.

Here are some reasons why imagination is a useful thing:

1. Imagination allows you to grow. If you make plans only based on experience, you will not be able to change or create anything. Imagination expands your boundaries and allows you to set goals that you have not achieved before.
2. Imagination helps you solve problems faster. Instead of trying to do “business as usual,” people with active imaginations come up with new strategies and solve problems faster. This is called creative thinking.
3. Imagination leads to discovery. For example, Albert Einstein imagined a place where people could stop time and capture the best moments of their lives forever. Ultimately, these thoughts led him to the creation of the general theory of relativity, which changed humanity's understanding of time. And without imagination, people to this day consider time to be a fixed quantity.
4. Imagination has given the world new inventions. Flying on an airplane, talking on the phone, having hot water in the bathroom - it all started with imagination. People wanted to fly like birds, talk to distant people, and not freeze in the bathroom. The list can go on for a long time. All these cool things around us exist thanks to our imagination.
5. Any creativity begins with imagination. Without imagination and fantasy, there would be no Beethoven's music, no Marvel Cinematic Universe, and all the stories that begin with "Once Upon a Time." Have you seen an unusual, beautiful building? The architect saw this first in his imagination. Imagination and creativity are inseparable concepts.
6. Imagination allows you to see beauty. Have you heard the saying “it works on the imagination”? Music, painting, beautiful view from the window, starry sky, golden trees in early autumn…. We perceive all these things through our imagination, which is why we see beauty. Let's put it this way: a person without imagination cannot look at a burning fire or flowing water for long. Although there are cats that can stare at one point for a long time. But I think it's something else.

A great example of a person with an active imagination is Stephen Hawking. In his imagination, he visited many corners of the Universe, exploring it and marveling at its splendor. Hawking's discoveries in the field of cosmology and quantum gravity were made directly from the wheelchair to which he was confined for most of his life. A person without imagination and fantasy is not capable of this.

Fantasy allows a person to search for the meaning of life and goals of activity.

Growing up stage

At first, children's fantasies require external support. For example, a wand helps you imagine yourself as a wizard, a toy crown as a princess, etc. But as they grow older, the need for external support gradually disappears, and the child begins to imagine various actions with objects internally, in his mind. This indicates the emergence of a new mental process - imagination.

Imagination (according to the famous Russian psychologist R.S. Nemov) is “the ability to create new ideas and thoughts based on existing experience and images and the ability to manipulate them.”

Thanks to imagination, a person has the opportunity to dream, go beyond the boundaries of his existence “here and now,” plunge into the past or imagine and foresee parts of the future.

Imagination allows you to explore the world of other people, to imagine something you have never seen before. It helps to set yourself up for upcoming activities, find non-standard solutions to problems, think creatively, and create. Certain types of activities (architectural, writing, engineering, music, acting, etc.) are, in principle, impossible without imagination.

In addition, in some situations, imagination helps to regulate your emotional state, cope with stress, and reduce the intensity of difficult experiences. It helps not only adults, but also children. You can temporarily put aside despair, fear, anxiety and gain the opportunity to move on:

1. memories of happy moments in the past;
2. dreams about the future;
3. imagining yourself in a pleasant and calm place, visualizing your desired state.

Thus, the importance of imagination in a person’s life is difficult to overestimate, and it is the ability to fantasize in childhood that gradually brings the child closer to mastering such an important ability. Therefore, we can safely say that most often fantasy is a normal and absolutely necessary stage of child development.

How is imagination different from fantasy?

These days there is a stereotype that they are one and the same. However, to refute this, I will give a simple phrase: Tomorrow is built in the imagination of today's people, today's science is a fantasy from the past.

Imagination is the means that allows an idea to become a reality. When we talk about imagination, we rely on logical reasoning. Fantasy is freethinking; it may be unreasonable and contrary to common sense. However, fantasy and imagination are closely related, and any creativity without them is simply impossible.

This can be easily explained using the example of science fiction. Many science fiction writers are ahead of their time, introducing technologies that the world has never seen before. For example, Julius Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea describes a submarine before the advent of real submarines. But this is not fantasy. The author specifically imagined the existence of such a ship in the real world.

Today it is science fiction about spaceships and the conquest of the universe. Space tourism is still in its infancy, and only Elon Musk promises us flights to Mars. But the authors of books like The Martian already have an idea of ​​what this might look like from a scientific point of view. Such fiction is based on logic and common sense. That is why fiction is called science fiction, and people who understand physics demolish works in which the authors made up nonsense.

Fantasy, on the other hand, is not limited by laws and rules. That's all that comes to your mind. It's far from science, but it can lead to some really smart ideas. Imagination is used by all creative people. Instead of logic, artists and musicians need a fever of colors and unexpected turns. With age, many people stop fantasizing. This is why they say that creative people are big children.

To summarize: our ideas are born from fantasy, grow in our imagination and then become reality.

Imagination and age

Childhood is not the only period in which imagination develops. It goes through several stages:

• Childhood;
• Transitional age;
• Adolescence.

Each of these three periods has its own characteristics and incentives.

In childhood, a child becomes acquainted with the world as such. Template thinking has not yet been formed. Everything happens for the first time, everything is new, everything arouses curiosity. At this age, the brain works very quickly. This is how nature intended. At the same time, the child has no knowledge about the world around him.

A teenager thinks differently. He is looking for his place in the real world. His imagination is based on the present, but at the same time he paints pictures of the future. Dreams become an important part of their thinking. Sometimes crazy and naive, but already rational.

Growing up presents a different challenge. And he himself is already different - more or less established views, more stable, more erudite. He can look into the distance and think creatively and freely, without restrictions. In adulthood, this ability may weaken under the influence of unfavorable circumstances.

For schizophrenia

In the context of the occurrence of the mental disorder known as schizophrenia, individuals who show signs of fulfilling this particular classification may experience fantasies as part of the diagnosis (Shneidman, ES 1948). Scientific research into the activity of the so-called default network in the brain (Randy Buckner et al. 2008) has shown individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia to have high levels of (“…hyperactive…”) activity within their brains.

In a study of eighty individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, it was found that a quarter of men who committed crimes against female contact were motivated by sexually oriented fantasies (AD Smith 2008).

Fantasy and reality

The common belief that fantasy is completely divorced from reality is wrong. Firstly, any fantasy can only be based on impressions of reality, that is, on what a person perceives.

By the way, many scientists saw the results of their many years of research precisely as a flash of imagination, as an insight. Thus, fragmentary puzzles of perception are assembled into a holistic picture, view, gestalt. And this possibility of imagination is also important.

For example, a child learns lesson after lesson about the features of some great event. He learns about what preceded this, what kind of people lived then, how they dressed, what habits and customs they had, how they built and developed. All this must come together into a picture, and this is a task for the imagination. This form of work becomes possible thanks to the experience of other people, the experience of society and expands the personal experience of the child and adult.

Freud and dreams

Reflection

(Daydream), 1901, by Paul César Elle

An equally positive view of fantasy was taken by Sigmund Freud, who considered fantasies (German: Fantasie

) in the protection mechanism.
He believed that men and women "cannot exist on the meager satisfaction which they can extort from reality. 'We simply cannot do without auxiliary structures' as Theodore Fontane once said... dwelling on imaginary desires for accomplishment." In the adaptation of childhood to the principle of reality, developed, so that it is also “one of the types of mental activity that stood out; she was kept free from reality testing and remained subordinate to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is fantasy
...continued in
daydreaming
. He compared such phantasizing to how “the reserve preserves its original state in which everything... including that which is useless, and even that which is harmful, can grow and multiply there as it pleases.”

Dreams for Freud are thus a valuable resource. "These waking dreams are cathected with a large number of interests, they carefully cherish the theme and are usually hidden with great sensitivity... such Fantasies can be unconscious just as much as in consciousness." He believed "These fictions include the great true constitutional essence of the personality of the subject" and that an energetic man "is one who has succeeded by his efforts in transforming his wishful thinking beyond actual fantasies into reality" while an artist "can transform his fantasies into works of art instead of into symptoms... thoughts of neurosis."

Mechanism of work: what, how, why and why?

Human mental activity occurs in two modes:

• Concentrated - mental effort is aimed at completing a specific task, and all the resources of short-term memory are involved in this process.
• Distracted - attention and effort are not focused on anything specific and lack motive. In this case, a person is engaged in routine tasks that are brought to automatic mode: cleaning, running, cooking while watching TV.

Miracles of fantasy are born in a distributed mode. The brain worked in collected mode. He collected and packaged information from gift sites and uncovered secret archives of memories. Then it's better to give him a rest. During rest, new information is processed and new connections are created between neurons. When everything is ready, the discovery comes naturally - non-standard and useful.

To understand how fantasy works, let's look at research conducted by neuroscientists at the University of California. Imagine the human brain, made up of billions of neurons. This is a library of experience and knowledge that is replenished throughout life. This is a repository for all the little things. This is a repository of everything forgotten and unconscious. And even a hastily looked through picture book will take its place in the neuron storage. Some library halls are always open, others are ajar for a moment, others are hidden behind wrought iron bars and heavy sign locks.

Every second consciousness accesses this repository of information. Having received a request, the brain uses working memory reserves and directs its thought process along a well-worn path to the group of neurons in which the requested information is stored. For example, if you want to solve an equation, your brain will direct you to those neural connections that store the algorithm for this action. The more familiar and routine the task, the faster the solution comes.

But what happens when a person sends an unconventional request to his subconscious? Accustomed to routine monotony, working memory directs thinking along well-trodden paths. The answer you get is either very ordinary or completely wrong. The situation is familiar to everyone. Example: February 23 and choose a gift for your loved one. What is the first thought that comes to his or her mind? Socks! Perhaps shaving foam, a penknife, underwear, deodorant. 90% of girls go through this list. This is where the need to think creatively arises. It would seem like a small thing, but how many problems and heartache?

What happens in the head of a person endowed with the gift of magical imagination?

• The first options are discarded,
• the request changes from “What to give?” on “Unusual gifts for February 23”,
• new schemes are launched, new solutions are proposed.

If the ideas are not satisfactory, the request is changed again, and so on until the desired result is achieved. No one knows through which corners of the subconscious a thought will pass. It all depends on the number of connections. While looking for gift ideas, a girl will come across her lover’s hobbies; she will remember an admiring Mr. Corkscrew or a collectible bottle of wine. She will remember his love for cars and strange air fresheners, about his dreams of playing golf or skydiving... At this moment, it is better to change the situation and think about something else.

According to statistics, children fantasize more and more often than adults.

Problems of imagination

Problems arise not when a person uses his imagination, but when he treats it in a special, one might say painful, way. For example, magical thinking.

In the Great Encyclopedia of Psychiatry you can read that magical thinking is, in its most general form, the belief that we can influence reality with our thoughts, fantasies and desires. Being a normal phenomenon, it is to a certain extent characteristic of children under 3-5 years of age, who believe that their thoughts are the cause or analogue of what is happening in external reality, as well as representatives of “primitive” cultures.

Magical thinking structures in some people coexist alongside other, later, more developed and complex cognitive programs. Thus, the orthodox mind may combine an incompatible belief in divine providence and the belief that a person can magically control the circumstances of his life and use, for example, the power of thought or mental image to control reality.

Getting out of a difficult situation

Sometimes children need fantasies to get away from problems and cope with unbearable experiences. With the help of imagination, they create their own world in which they can do things that are not possible in reality, feel successful, significant, loved, and control everything that happens. In this way, a kind of release of emotional tension occurs when unfulfilled needs are satisfied symbolically.

If a child resorts to such fantasy too often, it can replace other activities and become a place of escape from reality. In this case, the help of a child psychologist may be required.

“I had a rather toxic family,” Elena (35 years old) shares her memories, “so I often lost myself in fantasies. My parents argued and punished me for grades and wrong actions. And I tried to distance myself from all this and go into my thoughts. This infuriated them even more, they screamed. But more and more often I seemed to disconnect from what was happening, mentally reliving some work or film I had read, only I was myself as the main character. I came up with my own endings: as if I were saving the world, defeating enemies, breaking the hearts of fans. This habit remained with me for many years, until I began working with a psychologist as an adult.”

What kind of fantasies are there?

Fantasy is such a broad topic that it is impossible to consider it from all sides at once. Let's talk about the most popular ones.

Unconscious

Sometimes you can hear the reproach: “You are completely unimaginative.” In fact, there are no people incapable of imagination. Fantasies just arise unconsciously. Freud's psychoanalysis explains them in two ways: a) they initially arose in the unconscious; b) they arose in consciousness, but fell into the unconscious through suppression.

• Pros. This is a key concept in psychoanalytic theory and can help you learn a lot about yourself.
• Cons. If left uncontrolled, it can cause psychological and psychosomatic disorders or delusions.

Children's

Children's imagination is active from 3-3.5 years old and has no boundaries. Children come up with imaginary friends, plots for games, new stories for their favorite book or cartoon characters. In this way, they explore the world, learn to behave and communicate in the real world, form psychological defense mechanisms, and open up creatively.

• Pros. Imagination and creativity help them discover their uniqueness and talent, relax and just have fun.
• If a child is not taught the difference between fantasy and lies, he may grow up to be a pathological liar.

Scientific

Innovation is not just a fantasy. This is a revolution that makes it possible to go beyond the right answers and find a truly new solution. The combination of imagination and scientific thinking has led to the emergence of robotic surgeons, cellular communications, bioprosthetics, artificial intelligence, flexible smartphones, 3D printing and virtual reality.

• Pros. New trends in the world of innovation and creativity are expected - technological cities of the future, invincible quantum computers, 4D and 5D printing, robots capable of teaching, and a new generation of driverless cars.

Writing

The depth of the writer’s imagination allows the reader to travel in time and space, enter the artistic world of the characters, and observe fascinating events from the past and future. Books bring so many wonderful things, knowledge, emotions, advice, adventures into the lives of readers that one can only rejoice at such a rich imagination.

• Pros. Reading is the very form of leisure that brings the greatest feeling of happiness and satisfaction with life.

Erotic

Sexologists joke: 90% of people indulge in sexual fantasies, and the remaining 10% simply do not admit it. A night with an ex-partner, sex with a celebrity or a stranger, sexual games in nature or in an unfamiliar place - these erotic dreams help to “paint” a not very happy picture of reality.

• Active fantasies about sex allow you to weaken internal inhibitions, express and realize repressed desires.
• Too realistic and unrealized erotic fantasies can lead to sexual perversion. They also have a destructive effect on relationships. Especially if partners try to play them on the side.

Neurotic

The neurotic's frightening fantasies cause fear of an imagined future. These may be exaggerated fears of death, fears of a comet or falling house, fears of incurable diseases, perverted obsessions. All this has no basis in the present tense, but causes great discomfort to the neurotic.

• Suffering, emotional instability, uncertainty - all this is part of the personality of a neurotic. Obsession with one’s terrible illusions poisons the neurotic and everyone around him.

Erotic intelligence test, or How to understand our fantasies

Illustration: Masha Mlekopitaeva We have already become accustomed to and accepted the acronym EQ - emotional intelligence, or the ability to understand and adequately interpret our own and others’ emotions. Only recently they started talking about another EQ, erotic intelligence. Psychologies magazine defines it as “the ability to trust ourselves, understand our bodies, our boundaries, our values, and how we experience our own energy. It’s knowing what turns us on, what gives pleasure to our body.”

One of the most important parts of self-knowledge in this area is our sexual fantasies. Almost everyone has them, but not everyone knows what they mean. Moreover, stigmas of incredible proportions stand in the way of this understanding. Sociologist Michael Anderson says in his TED talk that of all the taboo topics for a couple to discuss, sexual fantasies are the most taboo.

Until now, many psychologists and therapists rely on the outdated interpretation of fantasies as an infantile escape from reality, compensation for weak libido and fears. “We have been taught to see fantasies as a symptom of neurosis or immaturity, as painful romantic idealizations that undermine the agency of the partner and are an escape from real relationships,” psychotherapist Esther Perel writes in her book Mating in Captivity.

One of the first to propose a new theory for understanding sexual fantasies was psychoanalyst Michael Bader. In his book Arousal: The secret logic of sexual fantasies, he shows that our sexual fantasies and preferences are not the result of social or biological programming, but rather a psychological tool with which the psyche confronts subconscious fears.

Over the past decades, we have pulled out a lot from under the heading “shame on you!” We discovered that with the help of laziness the body saves us from burnout, with the help of anger and disgust it protects us from toxic relationships, with the help of procrastination it tells us that we are doing something through force, across ourselves. The time has come to pull sexual fantasies out from under this stamp - our way of regulating the psyche. “Sexual fantasy is the guiding path we create to find our way between anxiety, guilt and inhibitions. This is the work of the conscious mind responding to the pressure of the subconscious,” writes psychoanalyst and social historian Nancy Friday in her book Men in Love.

Once upon a time, my father, a psychologist, doctor of sciences and academician, taught me to understand dreams. Sleep is like a valve on a pressure cooker. This is a way of consciousness to reduce internal tension from those feelings that we forbid ourselves to experience and express in our daily reality. When, before an important speech, I dream that I lost my children in the city or that all my documents were stolen, my subconscious relieves the fear and anxiety that I forbid myself to experience during the day, saying “everything will be fine,” “yes, you’ve done this a hundred times.” " The images that the brain pulls up are individual, but selected for the sole purpose - so that in a dream I experience anxiety, delight, hope, anger, despair - all that I do not really dare to feel consciously. Fantasies do the same. Sex, sexuality is a minefield in which here and there are hidden shame, condemnation, fears, anxieties, needs that we don’t really know about and don’t really want to know. With the help of sexual fantasies, our psyche gives us a helping hand. As in a dream, in fantasy, we step on a mine and do not explode, thereby living through the painful and dangerous without fear.

Precisely because sexual fantasies allow us to touch and experience feelings that are forbidden to us, they are rarely consistent with our opinion of ourselves or our public persona. A feminist who gets aroused by the fantasy of a tough dominant man, a mother of a family who is turned on by fantasies of quick sex in the toilet with a stranger, a loving husband who gets an erection from the fantasy of group sex with young temptresses, a domineering executive who dreams of being tied up may feel ashamed and hide something that causes erotic arousal in them, asking “what’s wrong with me?!”, “What kind of person am I?”, doubting their adequacy.

But the more shame that excites us is labeled, the more we suppress our erotic imagination, the worse it is for libido and acceptance of our sexuality. Understanding that the fantasy scenario is just a decoration, that fantasies, like art and dreams, cannot be interpreted literally, that this is only a construct of the psyche that opens the way to our sexuality to experience forbidden feelings, to get rid of fears, allows us to remove this stamp of shame.

According to one study, 62% of women fantasize about forced sex. In the era of #MeToo, this is a surprising discovery if we consider fantasy as a call to action. But fantasy is not a call to action. None of the women fantasize about pain due to a broken nose or knocked out teeth; in fantasy, forced sex causes arousal, pleasure, orgasm.

Dr. Laurie Beth Bisbee explains this phenomenon: “Such fantasies are like tearing off a tight corset. The attacker is always handsome, he belongs to the type of man to whom a woman would like to give herself anyway. He's rough and pushy with her, but he doesn't really hurt her, and eventually she gives in."

At the core of this fantasy lies a feeling of irresistibility, desirability. They want a woman in her so much that a man is simply obliged to possess her, he is unable to control himself. Hidden in this fantasy is the release that many modern women need so much from responsibility, the need to take care of themselves and make decisions, from caring about their partner’s ego, from shame and the prohibition on pleasure. She is unable to resist (read: she can relax), she is forced to surrender (read: she can finally lose control), she is aroused in spite of herself (read: she gets rid of the mask of the right girl) and she orgasms from this forbidden fall for her . In fact, she experiences an orgasm from liberation, the realization of the forbidden and the lack of responsibility for everything in the world, including her own orgasm.

In fantasies, our decorative heroes save us from fears and self-rejection. The fantasy of being tied up allows one to experience submission without the fear of being in a submissive position, temporarily surrendering one's need for control to a cardboard rapist in a black mask. The fantasy of insatiable, always wanting beauties gives us the missing feeling of desirability and confidence. Phantasmagoric heroines in stockings or dressing gowns always want nurses, they always feel good, they don’t have headaches, they don’t have to pick up their child from kindergarten, they don’t have a past, sexually transmitted diseases, a bag of groceries and irritation with video games. With fantasy heroes, you can take risks without taking risks, be in danger without being in danger, express desire without being embarrassed, be dependent without being dependent, take what is yours without fear of causing pain.

Men fantasize about a woman who does not need to be persuaded and lured, who will not refuse, who is always in the mood, who will not say with a contemptuous face: “How can you think about sex now!” With her, they can not feel guilty for wanting sex, responsibility for being sure to give pleasure and to be “on top”. Women fantasize about a long, beautiful, forbidden seduction, in which she is not embarrassed by cellulite and the shape of her breasts, in which she sees and feels infinitely desired, and is not ashamed that she needs long foreplay. The mysterious persistent stranger will not run away if she says something is wrong, will never lose an erection for which she feels responsible, will not turn to the wall and will not snore. In our fantasies, we allow ourselves to express anything: fear, resistance, arrogance, aggression, desire. Scream in a way you can’t shout with your neighbors behind the wall, have sex in a way you can’t have with the mother of your own children, demand - and receive, don’t ask - and receive. Our scripts may change, but what we seek in sex, what we get from it does not change: ecstasy, power, escape, attraction, desirability, rebellion, intimacy, understanding, victory, confidence, freedom. All that we are missing.

The heroes of our fantasies always know exactly how we want, what excites us, what brings us great, forbidden pleasure. Because they are us. We know this. It is we who heal ourselves, who open ourselves, who free ourselves, who stop denying ourselves. It is we who give ourselves clues - what inside us requires a way out, what we have prohibited, suppressed, ridiculed, shamed, thrown out of consciousness. It is we who unite in fantasy with everything rejected, into wholeness. And we experience an orgasm.

Welcome to erotic intelligence.

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What is escapism?

Escapism is a synonym for escape, no matter where: work, sex, art, life, religion, remote villages, monasteries, conversations on the forum, games, intoxication or psychotropic substances. Against the background of such “interests,” escaping into a fantasy world looks harmless. But this is only at first glance.

The world invented by fantasy looks more attractive than reality. It is the latter that saves the psyche from destruction. But gradually such “mind games” replace the real world with an imaginary one. When the boundary between illusion and reality weakens, self-control, a sense of responsibility for one’s life, and the desire to improve something and achieve something disappear. Therefore, degradation, descent into psychosis or the development of personality disorders are possible. And this is already a diagnosis.

What to do in such a situation? Step back and look at it from the outside. In fact, a far-fetched illusion only becomes a powerful force when it motivates action. It is important to distinguish between different forms of fantasy:

• Sweet dreams are like “rose-colored glasses” in which there is no room for reality - not a very good sign.
• Fantasies that charge you with energy and move you forward are useful.

There is one more secret: turning fantasies into reality is much more interesting than fantasizing about nothing.

HOW TO EXPLAIN THE UNEXPLAINABLE

Since childhood (from the childhood of humanity and from our personal childhood), we have to somehow correct this unsatisfactory situation. Haeckel’s law, disliked by modern biology (“ontogenesis is a brief repetition of phylogeny”), seems to be playing out here, on a foreign site, in full force. Our ancestors easily turned unknown and inexplicable things and phenomena into funny, scary, friendly or dangerous, but always outlandish entities.

They did this, undoubtedly, in the interests of the integrity of the observed world and the preservation of cause-and-effect relationships in it. Thunder rumbles because Elijah the prophet is riding in a chariot. In the forest, a goblin confuses the paths, Baba Yaga flew across the sky with a lantern in a mortar, a drowned man was dragged away by a mermaid, and kikimoras braided the horse’s mane...

Our children are doing exactly the same thing today. “Who's knocking there? “Babai lives behind the wall.” “Why is the curtain swaying so strangely? “There’s a ghost standing there.” An explosive mixture of primitive explanations and sweet metaphysical horror, just like our ancestors. Sometimes, in its pure form, it is the fruit of an uncomplicated child’s imagination.

From my practice. A five-year-old child asked: “Why do they smear iodine on a scratch?” They answered him: “To kill germs.” And they didn’t explain anything else. “Why does iodine sting? - thought the child. - After all, if you wash it with water, it won’t hurt. Yeah! (A consistent fantasy picture began to form.) Water does not kill microbes, but iodine kills them. Microbes are something living (since they die), such very small harmful animals. And so, when they die, they, in their final anger, cling to your hand with their little teeth. That’s why it hurts (the picture was completed).”

How to develop imagination and fantasy in adults

Imagination is an ability that is innate to every person. Therefore, it does not need to be taught, it just needs to be nourished.

To develop your imagination, you simply need to engage in activities that stimulate it. Below is a list of recommendations that, in my opinion, are the simplest and most effective.

Turn off the TV and find a hobby

Watching TV is a common way to relieve stress after a hard day at work. I myself like to watch a few episodes of TV on the weekend or before bed. But this is a way of passive relaxation, in which the brain is inactive.

Instead of constantly observing other people's lives, find a hobby that allows you to create your own story.

Pay attention to funny little things

Try to find strange and funny things where there are none. Funny combinations of inscriptions on nearby billboards, bizarre shapes of clouds, funny gait of a pigeon. All of these things require imagination and can make your life a little more fun (a nice bonus).

Try doing nothing

Our mind is constantly in a noisy environment due to external stimuli. This could be the same TV, music, constant social networks and notification feed. Try sitting in silence and listening to your own thoughts. Sometimes you can be amazed by the ideas and insights that come to mind when you are not distracted.

Listen to music without words

Listening to music has been proven to improve productivity at work. But if these are songs with lyrics, then we subconsciously listen to their ideas, leaving our own. I myself have noticed that even songs in a language I don’t know can unsettle me. On the other hand, music without lyrics stimulates the imagination and gives the green light to new ideas.

Human fantasy: modern methods of study

To recognize creativity and determine originality, the following methods are used:

1. Unconventional use or interpretation of objects. The subject must invent several ways to use everyday objects in unusual ways or interpret unclear images.
2. Anticipating results. The test taker describes the consequences that can be expected due to a change in a particular situation.
3. Title for the story. The person is asked to come up with several original titles for the story they read.
4. Rorschach test. The task for the subject is to present unique interpretations of ink blots.
5. TAT. The individual is shown several pictures and asked to interpret them, compose a story based on them, and come up with a solution to the situation depicted.
6. Anagrams. It is necessary to create rarely used lexemes from the letters that are part of the given word.
7. Writing a story. It is necessary to come up with a narrative that would include the maximum number of words from the proposed 50 adverbs, adjectives and nouns.
8. Shulman test. Closed spaces should be found in complex forms.

All of these tests are based on a view of creativity as an illogical process. The test results reveal originality of thinking, sensitivity to novelty, and sensitivity to difficult problems.