The Pleasures of Imagination - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pleasures-of-Imagination/65678

This made me wonder if story telling (or writing) is just helping others get as much out of your imagination as you do.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger."

"First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds."

The Pleasures of Imagination - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education http://goo.gl/c7t8 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/16164664745]