“We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones”—not that we can’t distinguish them, but that we don’t. Bloom points out that while very small children may be confused in these matters, well before the age of four they have it all scoped out pretty accurately: “Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she
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