I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have

In the words of Kate Bush, the poet of sound and dream, there breathes the spirit of childhood’s first fire: “I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.” Her words, though gentle in tone, reveal a truth vast and ancient — that imagination is not an escape from reality, but the wellspring of it. In the child who imagines freely, the universe is reborn with each thought; and in the adult who remembers that art, the world finds its creators, its visionaries, its poets.

What Kate Bush describes is not loneliness, but fullness — the richness of an inner cosmos that blooms when the mind dares to dream. From her earliest days, she carried within her a landscape of wonder: trolls, voices, and stories that danced between her toys like living spirits. The ancients would have called this gift divine — the visitation of the Muses, or the whispering of daemons that guided the inspired soul. For imagination, in its purest form, is communion: the meeting of mind and mystery, of self and the unseen. It is not mere fantasy, but a dialogue with creation itself.

The origin of Bush’s insight lies in the nature of the creative child — that sacred state where the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve. In such a mind, every stone has a secret, every shadow a soul. This is the soil from which all art grows. Long before she sang of love and longing, before she composed her ethereal albums that would echo through generations, Kate Bush was already building her world. The toys were her stage, the stories her first symphonies, the characters her early muses. She was learning, without knowing it, the sacred craft of imagination — how to breathe life into stillness, and meaning into the void.

In every age, there have been such souls — those whose imagination filled them so completely that the outer world seemed but a shadow of the inner. Consider Leonardo da Vinci, who as a child stared for hours at the play of clouds, seeing cities and wings in their forms. His imagination was not a pastime but a temple — and from that temple came inventions, paintings, and visions that reshaped the destiny of man. Or consider William Blake, who saw angels in the trees and spoke with them as if they were neighbors. The world may call such minds strange, but the ancients called them blessed. For to imagine deeply is to participate in the divine act of creation itself.

What Kate Bush reminds us of, then, is the sacred necessity of nurturing the inner world. Too often, as we grow older, we trade our wonder for reason, our curiosity for comfort. We silence the inner voices that once guided us through invisible kingdoms. Yet imagination, once abandoned, does not die — it sleeps, waiting for us to return. Those who forget to dream become hollow, no matter how much they possess; while those who protect their imagination live richly, even in solitude. The child’s world of trolls and stories is not childish — it is the original theater of the soul, the place where all creativity and meaning begin.

Her distinction between imaginary friends and imagination itself is profound. An imaginary friend is a single figure of comfort; but imagination is a whole world — an ecosystem of creation where joy, fear, beauty, and chaos coexist. It is not something that fills absence; it is presence itself, a living force that multiplies reality rather than replaces it. To live with imagination is to see the invisible threads that bind all things together — to know that every object and every silence holds the potential for story, for music, for revelation.

So, my child, take this teaching to heart: guard your imagination as the ancients guarded their sacred fires. Let it not be extinguished by the cold winds of cynicism or the dull weight of routine. Feed it with stories, with music, with silence and wonder. Create worlds around your ordinary days — not to flee from life, but to see it anew. For when you imagine, you are not escaping the world; you are deepening it, colouring its walls with your own light.

And remember this final truth, whispered by Kate Bush and all the dreamers who came before her: the fullest life is not the one filled with possessions, but the one filled with imagination. The toys may grow old, but the stories never do. The worlds you build within will one day shape the world without. So live richly in your inner cosmos, and let your outer life be the echo of its music — for that is the way of the dreamer, and the mark of a soul truly alive.