The spontaneous imaginings of childhood have a unique fascination. They take various forms, including make believe, the creation of imaginary companions, pretence and day-dreaming. One less common but delightful form of imagining is the spontaneous creation of an imaginary private world, which for a considerable period keeps recurring and thereby tends to become elaborated and systematized. Such paracosms, as the authors call them, vary widely, according to the age at which they begin, the time for which they continue, and the influence of such factors as gender and family. In this study David Cohen, film maker and psychologist, and Stephen MacKeith, retired psychiatrist, have gathered together and explored the material relating to over sixty examples of such private worlds. The result is a study of an imaginative activity that has been part of the childhood of such brilliant and creative minds as Friedrich Nietzsche, Anthony Trollope, Thomas de Quincey, C.S.Lewis and Robert Louis Stevenson.

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