There is a condition called aphantasia where missed connections in the brain do not allow humans to visualise images in the mind's eye. Etymologically phantasia means imagination, channelled to Modern English from the Greek word phainomai: to appear. The prefix ‘a’ – not or without – added here feels especially cruel to me. My father suffered from this disorder. Once, just after the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, he had a dream where I was captured in a white van and disappeared. He didn't dream. I was a loudmouth, an activist. His dream held truth. We both knew it, but what set him off was the veracity of the image in his mind because it was new to him. ‘Picture a dragon,’ my father said. And I easily conjured Smaug from the animated Hobbit and told him as much. ‘I can't do that,’ he said. ‘Even if I try, I can’t.’ I didn't think to ask him then if it had always been this way, and I cannot ask now because he died soon after, but I’ve been terrified of losing my mental theatre ever since. I spent most of my childhood deeply invested in my fantasy life, one so necessary to my everyday existence that I’d set aside time as a boy to follow my designs either in my bedroom, or I’d choose to face the back of the couch when my mother wanted me near, the grey dark, a perfect atmosphere to drift through phantasia. I grew up in a poor, urban centre where water veins and abandoned houses were my hundred-acre wood, and so movies often served as catalysts. The movie Stand by Me, perhaps more than any other correlative in my early life, created the beginnings of fantasy travel. There were so many elements that appealed to my sense of self, but chief among them was the rag-tag friendships and the attempt to suspend a fracturing of the gang through adventure. It is dark to say, but I wanted adventure to begin with a lie told to my parents that ended with finding a dead body. I saw through those boys’ experience – Chambers, LaChance, Tessio, Duchamp – how important fear, near-death, the breakdown of self-esteem and the admittance of thresholds and boundaries were to the adventure itself. Perspective.