Imagination

Almost every day we are exposed to fantasies, either through advertising, movies or the Internet. But what does that do to our own imagination?


Imagination: is it also a dying medium?
Books used to be the magic portals to the land of imagination, but nowadays as society is becoming ever more busy, there might be not enough time for reading and it is easier to watch a movie than to read a book. A proof of that are the many book adaptations or stories based on books, which let you know the plot without having to actually read the book.

But I believe it does much more than that. With the delivery of the plot, movies give also an image of what the characters and places look like, so you don't use your imagination.
I'm not saying it is wrong to see book adaptations, but they are limiting, as they give you somebody else's interpretation of the story and don't let you create your own. It helps if you first read a book and then see the movie, as the first, imagined, world stays longer in your mind.

At a very young age I realized that movies don't create the reality I want from a book. I remember how we were going on a class trip to the cinema to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and I was reading the book very late into the night to have it read first, before seeing the film. With every consecutive Harry Potter movie I felt more and more angry, because it seemed to me to become ever more distant from the reality within the book. But it wasn't until part 4 when I decided not to see another Harry Potter movie. They left out major parts of the plot, but the thing that annoyed me most was the character of Mad-Eye Moody. He was so far from the one I imagined in my head, but I could not shake the picture from my mind. Somehow I managed to suppress the movie version of Moody with my own imagined one, but that was when I realized that movies are very dangerous to our imagination and once you associate the image with a character that you have actually seen on screen, it is very difficult to swap it for your imagined one. That is one of the reasons I never saw The Chronicles of Narnia - I just love my imagined version too much and having seen the posters i decided that nobody would force me to see it.

So if you don't have the time to read, choose audio books. Even though you are not actually reading, you still can imagine all the things that movies serve you on a golden plate.