Or a bad thing?
On one hand, it sends you spiralling safely into worlds you will never have to risk, and at the end of it all, it lets you return home. You don't have to go there again if you don't want to (although nightmares have a will of their own). It's a way of testing things you think you might want to explore, but won't, or can't, or shouldn't do. We all have those, I'm sure.
The illusion is that imagination is not nearly so dangerous as reality. In actual terms, maybe it is more dangerous.
On the second (and covert) hand, Imagination opens doors, and then you find you can't close them again. Imagination is the rust on the hinges, the sock stuffed under the door-jamb, the moisture that swells the wood - preventing a previously snug fit from filling its chosen and previously acceptable hole.
Some liken it to allowing a caged bird to fly free, and then trying to get it back into the cage - whilst expecting it to be happy there. John Osborne said 'A Taste of Honey' 'is a dangerous thing' in his play of the same (capitalised) name. He could have been talking about imagination too.
My imagination is wild and free, and wanders all over the place. It subverts my every day life, and criticises me for my dullness. It is 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' - a phrase used by Lady Caroline Lamb to describe Lord Byron - but she might have been surreptitiously rummaging in my head.
I used to keep it under lock and key. Or subvert it into simple creative pleasures in dramatic terms - but since all that went by the wayside, it has been delving deeper into the madness of the psyche in a much more dangerous way.
And I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing.
I only know, that it is very difficult to give it up.
It really doesn't want to go back in the cage. It wants to fly free.
