Photo (c) Nick Wright 2017
The stories are getting more complicated as he gets older. He still arrives at about 6 am clutching the Beebops, who still greet me and, using my voice, relay their adventures of the night before. A year ago they were happy just to go to the park or the beach, but things move on. Now, when Noah is asleep, they apparently filch the keys to Daddy's Ford Ranger (the speediest truck on the road!), and drive off into the night to fly about the place in helium balloons, liberate lions and elephants from circuses, go to the airport for trips to Africa, or Spain or Auckland, and evade prosecution for underage driving by the simple expedient of turning back into toys when the police officer looks through the window.
Yesterday, as the the intrepid stuffed rabbits were making their way to Christchurch's rocket base for a trip to Saturn, Noah put his hand up to shield his mouth from the Beebops' view and whispered to me, "This is just imagining, Pappa. Their legs are floppy and they can't really walk." He was letting me in on the secret that it was the Beebops' imagination that was manufacturing these stories. He's a very bright little boy and of course he knows that, really, it's me that's making all this stuff up, but there was a quite complex process causing a logjam in his head, which in that moment, he couldn't quite sort out.
When we engage with a story we enter that story and live for a while in the fictional universe invented by the storyteller. For a while we suspend our disbelief of what we know to be a blatant lie, to the extent that when the characters in the story are threatened we feel frightened, and when they are bereaved we weep, and when they triumph we rejoice in their victory. We see what they are seeing and know the timbre of their voices and we like or dislike these phantasms of someone else's devising as though they have actual personalities and histories of their own. But all the while we never cease to dwell in our own accustomed universe (which is itself a kind of fiction, but let's not get onto that today). So Noah, in company with a couple of rabbits, backs down the driveway in his father's purloined ute and gets ready to blast off into space, and he sees the darkness of the street and feels all the anticipation and dread of the adventure ahead, while all the while he is conscious of me beside him, and the sound of his sister in the hallway, and the state of his own stomach and the smell of toasting bread which tells him breakfast is only 10 minutes away. Momentarily, the nested array of his various imagined worlds is unresolved, and he urges me to keep a hold on my own reality.
We, all of us, can hold two, or sometimes more, realities in our heads at the same time. Like Higg's Bosons we can be in two places at once. We can be simultaneous participants in two separate universes, each with its own self consistent set of governing laws and geographic realities, All of us do this every day, sometimes many times a day.
I think our ability to do this is related to the way our brains work. We have, all of us, in effect two brains, the left and right hemispheres tied together by the narrow bridge of the corpus callosum and working as a single unit, but nevertheless providing two quite different modes of processing and directing attention to two quite different fields of awareness. I suspect that it is also related to the likelihood that the mechanism of our brains is quantum, and that quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement are involved in the operation of our perception and processing, and leave tell tale traces in the structure of our thoughts.
But be that as it may, in the darkness of a rainy Canterbury morning Noah was suddenly presented with and invited into a fictional universe which was more than usually engaging, and as he relinquished his disbelief to enter it, he had to quickly realign a number of realities of varying degrees of congruence with the one he usually inhabited. As we all do, every day, sometimes many times a day.
Comments