Last week I dressed up as a teddy bear and visited Wilf’s class at school as the guest of honour at their teddy bear’s picnic. It was the first time I’d worn the suit since my failed attempt to get arrested back in 2005 (see I Fought The Law for more details).

Waiting in the staff room bear-suited up before going into the hall for the main event was far more nerve wracking than the green room of Newsnight or the One Show, but it proved to be a rather mesmerising experience.

One of the many things I’m learning about young children is the lack of distinction between their imagination and the real world. As adults we exist in the physical world but we’re well aware of the imaginary, or mental world, too. Each has their place though, and one rarely invades the other - except in the case of certain ‘paranormal’ phenomena. Of course a few of the kids voiced the suspicion that I was in fact a person in a furry suit, but many of them were utterly transfixed, as though a teddy bear who called himself ‘Boris’, and who could speak their language, was entirely plausible.

The look children have on their face when their physical and imaginary worlds meet in this way is a privilege to behold. As though both merging like this is how life really is, rather than the three dimensional version they seem to be stuck in most of the time. It was a look of excitement but also one of relief. The way their eyes widened seemed to re-assure them that their internal imaginary world did indeed have a place in the ‘real’ world too. It makes you wonder what these two modes of perceiving the world actually are, and whether there are two modes at all.

It’s a sticky business separating what we think of as the physical world and the world of our individual minds, when in reality both are worlds of the mind. We may ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’ and ‘taste’ the physical world but our senses are just the means our brains use to turn this information into brain waves in our own internal ‘world’ for our ‘mind’ to understand. We might think our brains make a distinction between the phenomena our senses interact with and the imaginary things we construct and dissect in our heads, but both are interpreted by the brain in exactly the same way - as thoughts. The distinction is just a kind of mental scaffolding adults develop to help them make sense of things so they can imagine two different compartments working in the brain. This is the kind of thing we do when we ‘grow up’- something children, wonderfully, have not yet suffered to do. But the reality is that thoughts are thoughts, whether they are from the ‘real’ world or our imaginary one, which is why our imaginations are so vivid and astounding. Some people (like me) think that the ‘real’ world is always second rate in comparison to the ideal imagined version that resides in our head, which accounts for the sense of anticlimax you feel on those occasions when you get exactly what you want, but that’s another story (see the end of blog entry Uncharacteristic outburst of anger).

The teachers very kindly gave me a thank you card and a box of chocolates for coming in as ‘Boris’. It seems the children really enjoyed meeting the rather dozy bear who claimed once to have known Paddington in Peru before he vanished into thin air. It was real joy for me too, a glimpse of what life is like when the veil between the real world outside your head and the real world that resides within it has been lifted. The look of awe in their eyes was a reminder that the way adults view the world is no less of a mental construct than the way children engage with their own imagination, something that could help us all understand children, and ourselves, a bit better too.

dan@idler.co.uk