“A paracosm is an imaginary world.

We sign up to ‘subscribe to one’ when we read a book, see a film, or even listen to a friend convey to us some story, real or fictional (or necessarily both, since it is encoded in language…)

One can employ a paracosm as an explanatory or descriptive overlay … on the worlds of ordinary (and nonordinary) experience.

Most simply: an imaginary world, with imaginary identities, roles, circumstances and purposes… threats and opportunities…

Why would we be so confused as to pretend there is anything else? We would need one of these to properly understand what we imagine to be the unimagined, i.e. ‘the real’ world.

So our paracosms are ‘the interpretive layer’ we impose upon …. experience. And we similarly employ narratives, models, explanations and descriptions… of the phenomena encompassed by our (mostly waking-world) experience.

( This is a form of active disambiguation… according to templates well-established and long practiced (for adults))

Children can compose and impose paracosms on the world at-will. Adults largely employ ‘off-the-shelf’ versions of single, continuously sustained paracosms. These, are, effectively, their imgaginal hypostasis (smaller, simpler imaginal representation of) a: the universe, b: the world, c: ‘what’s going on’ and d: the purposes for which one traverses this tree.

Awareness of d: is golden, though that’s not my purpose in proposing that this perspective is »useful (whether or not it is »authoritative).

The adults participate in a world of partly-shared, largely tyrannical (partial translation: actual rather than potential, job rather than role, functionally specified rather than ambiently selected role)… and these, to some degree, have structure that exchanges domains of liberty for reliable rewards…

… intimacy for convenience … and ‘dependability’, that bizarre quality that translates into ‘less threat (and opportunity) detection (per interval)’ and thus… convenience. That quality that allows us the luxury of returning »more awareness to either ‘leisure’ or opportunity-farming…

Now from this sketch, whether or not it is authoritative, or totally accurate, you can understand why (please complete this post with your own imagination).”

— an intelligence agent