Imaginary Playgrounds

Imagine imagining a playground, just for the fun of it. A completely imaginary playground that doesn’t need to be strong or safe or public. Your own, private, personal playground that is fun just imagining yourself playing in.

A few years ago, my granddaughter Reina (she was about 7) and I would make up stories whenever we took a long walk together. This is a slightly edited version of what we made up after walking past a small pet shop:

There are two playgrounds: one is in the clouds, the other in the ocean.

In the cloud playground, all the clouds are like trampolines. You can do somersaults, jumping jacks, play games, sit and bounce on your tush, bounce a ball.

Everybody can play there – kids, adults, even dolphins and octopuses.

There’s a candy machine on every cloud where you can just think of the candy you want and the machine gives it to you.

There’s a little house on most of the clouds. Inside, there’s a swing that can swing really high or really slow, and makes your voice echo.

Then there are slides in all the gardens that let you slide all the way around the world.

You can slide yourself into the ocean to say hi to the octopus and the dolphins.

Your slide can stop anywhere you want. So if you’re in the ocean with the dolphins, you can stop, talk to the dolphins, get some of their delicious candy plant that tastes exactly the way you want it to, and then get back on the slide and go on to wherever you want to go.

And on the cloud trampolines there’s a button that you can press and it makes you jump really high or just regular.

There are trampolines in the cloud playground and the water playground.

When you jump, you will find candy plants floating in the air or the water and you can grab them and eat them.

The whole cloud is like one big trampoline – you can’t walk, you can only jump.

Candy plants are very colorful.

If you give one to somebody, it turns them into your friend.

You can give it to somebody or some animal who is not your friend, and they will eat it and love it, and while they’re eating it, you can run away.

The outside of the plant is crunchy.

Creating an imaginary playground is as wonderful an experience for adults as it is for children. Wonderful, and potentially profound. It is the basis of a CD I made called “Recess for the Soul” (available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dekoven ).  A thought experiment just for fun, just to see how far one can take this kind of imaginary journey into one’s inner playground.

If you would like some exemplary instructions in, say, building an imaginary tire swing, you might be interested in this article, recently published on deepFUN.com - http://www.deepfun.com/a-tire-swing-for-your-inner-playground/ – wherein you discover that it is surprisingly easy to re-imagine your tire into anything from a hammock to a hot tub.