I'm writing a children's book. It's a book that contains some terrible darknesses; in it, I literalize the imaginations of children, in the form of "Ships." The children are members of a society who call themselves "Sky-Riders," and fly around in Sky-Ships that are, quite simply, avatars of the imagination.

The Sky-Riders' ships come into existence in an interesting way. They are "sown" when the children are very young, by a clan of people called the Dromogons, who tell stories to the Sky-Rider children. When a child hears the story the Dromogons tell to them (each story is for them and them alone), a seed is sown in that child's mind. And in the morning, when the children awake, there is a real seed on the pillow beside their heads. The seeds are taken to the Parent-Ships of the children's Flotillas, where they are enmeshed in a silken cocoon. And for the next ten years or so, the cocoons grow, suspended from the Parent-Ships. Then one day the cocoon hatches, and the child has his or her own Ship to fly around in, through the skies.

The book opens with a man suffocating the cocooned Ships of some of the Sky-Riders' children, Ships which, as I said, are the literalized avatars of the children's imaginations. After the man has suffocated the ships, he enslaves the ships' ghosts, all that remains of the children's imaginative enactment. To my mind it is this latter action that is worse: after killing the Ships, the man forces their ghosts to work for him. He compels them to an existence dedicated to darkness. To a terrible, bleak subsistence.

That is the point of this essay. The ghosts of the imagination. I am haunted by the ghosts of our imaginations.

There was a time when we believed things were possible. When we believed that many impossible things were, nonetheless, in spite of their (admitted?) impossibility, real. A time when our ideas of what is "real" were not predicated on a thing's actual existence in the world.

When dreaming could make a thing so. Because the thing entered the world, through the dream.

Now, I am not someone to claim, naively, that the dream realm is one that I long to inhabit. Far from it. The unconscious has its way with us. It carries the long dark night of our ancestry with it. I know that.

And yet, to live a life defined by, limited to, that which is "real?" How feasible is that? How limiting is that!

I miss the time when the imagination was alight. I regret its passing. The time when the line separating realms Imaginary and Real was thinner. More easily crossed. That interpenetrable state is one that I long for, and mourn. How did we come to accept a state of reality in which, by definition, so many of the most wonderful things cannot find a place?

Cannot be said to exist.

In my story, there exist children whose Ships, whose imaginative vehicles, are literally snuffed out. Suffocated. The children who lose their Ships in this way are partly at fault. Partly. They allowed themselves to be discouraged. They succumbed.

But not all of the children accept this ending as an ending. Some of them find the strength to imagine something new, to create a new imaginary form that has not yet been conceived of by their society. (Nor by me—not, anyway, till I finish the book.)

That is courage. That is redefining the real. Living in relation to it, without being ruled by it. They give me hope, the children of my story.

Several months ago, I started working as a kind of mentor/ big sister to a girl from an impoverished town near mine. She is underprivileged. She is neglected. When asked what she wanted from the state-run mentorship program in which she was enrolled, she couldn't say, only that she wanted to get away—! To go somewhere else.

She wants something more. She doesn't know what that is.

It's painful for both of us, the slow gradual process of building up a language. A language that allows her to imagine what she wants. Allows her to imagine Something More.

We tell each other stories, because so far, we don't yet have a language to talk to each other. But the stories help. We begin to see.

This is what gives me hope. The imagination. That it kindles.