This essay explores the means of an imaginative journey which occur in one's imagination that is used to escape reality, face fears and contemplate ideas.

Imaginative journeys occur in the realm of the mind - a realm where reality is considered, and fantasy is created. The imaginative journey moves the participant into an environment that could not possibly exist in our understanding of the real world, or recreates a tale that has never occurred. The common aspect of the imaginative journey is fictionality.

The journey that is imagined often evokes the theme, or event, of change. This change can be anything: change of self, change of surroundings, change of beliefs, change of location or even change in time. The possibility for change is endless. However, these changes can be generalised into a change of one of three main components: state, space, and or time. State refers to the makeup of an object or character. A change in this realm can be a change of either physical (the destruction of Babylon) or philosophical (an individual's altering opinions on life elements).

President George W. Bush awards the Presidential M...

Film producer Alan J. Pakula with Lee; Lee spent t...

Bad Imagination

The realm of space involves a physical location. A change in space involves shifting from one location to another. The last realm, time, is a period between two events. A change in time involves a shift from one event to another, or the chronological progress in an object's lifetime.

The actual journey itself can be simplified into having three components: a beginning (in which a conflict becomes apparent, which creates the need for change), a middle (where the process of change occurs), and the end, (where it becomes apparent whether the changes have solved the conflict, or have failed). However, many modern composers oppose the strict sense of a beginning, middle or end. The composer may transpose the order in which events occur (such as in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, which is structured ab ovo). Indeed, the journey may not even have...