Imagination-land: What's it like in there?

Do you ever just watch your kid playing and wonder what the world looks like through their eyes? My son is 9 months old and I don't give him much screen time - although, yes, he loves the Wiggles!

But I'll set up his toys around the room, I've cut holes and shapes into a cardboard box and I watch my son moving from object to object, pushing buttons, stuffing the elephant's trunk into his mouth, standing himself up on the couch cushions. I'm so curious to know what it is that he sees and experiences.

I remember when I was a little kid and I would make up stories for how ordinary things were actually extraordinary. That old TV set up in a cavern of cardboard boxes with bottle caps and other colourful objects as buttons. That was a time-machine that I invited my family and neighbours to come and travel to different periods of time. I created an entire speech for a school speaking competition around how a vending machine supposedly has a network of tiny people (like oompa-loompas but miniaturised) inside, turning cogs, pushing buttons, feeding the chocolate bars through tubes until they presented out the bottom of the machine for our consumption - there was a drawn diagram that went with this. It was elaborate and very detailed and all completely imagined. 

I miss the days of exploring wild terrain, making friends with jungle creatures, crossing dangerous streams, and just having that real illusion that you're in another place and time. And I wonder what far off place my son is exploring as he crawls around our living room. Is he in outer-space making friends with aliens, sharing his toys with them? Is he in a cave somewhere jumping from rock to rock and talking to the bats, trolls and other cave creatures? Is he in a wild jungle, swinging from vines, making friends with monkeys, lions and colourful birds?

It would be cool to see the filter that he's using when he plays. Like on our social media, I can see him switching between jungle filter, ocean filter, space alien filter.

I think as adults we imagine in different ways. We dream of vacations in exotic places, we picture ourselves living in the perfect home with none of the clutter and mess that accumulates with time. Maybe if you have a mortgage, you imagine yourself debt free? What it would be like to win the lotto, maybe?

I dream of places I've travelled to, I don't think it's imagination exactly, more like total recall. I try to recall all the details of a particular trip, the people we met, the spontaneous adventure that happened out of just exploring a foreign city. My sister and I travelled through Europe together a few years ago. And I still remember dancing salsa in the shared hotel room with our roommates from America, the drinking game of nails we played in the hostel in Austria with a tree trunk, hammer and yep, you guessed it, nails.

I sometimes wish that my brain could still conjure up those mystical lands, those far off places, the things only a young mind can dream up. Is it just me? I love watching my son, babbling away in his baby language and wondering what illusions he's conjured up. I want to encourage him to always dream and imagine and create. At what point do illusions shatter? When does reality truly sink in? I hope for Tobias' sake, that it lasts as long as possible.