I remembered it in a dream last night. It was an oblong board on the wall above my bed that pictured a midnight sky with big stars. Mounted on some sort of pressboard, it had some sort of 1950’s-surface sticky enough to hold up cardboard 
figures of Peter Pan, Wendy, Michael, and John. I can’t remember whether these figures flew over the rooftops of London, or the islands of Never Land, but they were mine to arrange and play with, which I did endlessly (especially when I was supposed to be sleeping).
How startling to recall it after so many decades! Even while I dreamed, I was struck by how enchanting it had been. Gosh, I had played with those figures until they tattered and fell apart sometime in my pre-teen years.
Can children today, surrounded by blazing images of everything, enjoy the same creative stimulus from objects in their rooms? Specifically, I thought about the constantly changing screen-savers on computers and cell-phones. None of the images lingers long enough to mean anything.
For that matter, how does a child’s imagination respond to the stimulus of constantly changing digital photo-frames? While on the surface these gadgets seem like a wonderful invention, I suspect that the human mind responds far more creatively, if given a limited visual frame of reference. Isn’t that where the imagination begins?
Photo by pineapplebun (Creative Commons)
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