We aim to build on Dabourg and Baumard's proposal that imaginary worlds exploit evolutionary preferences for exploration, and appreciate the authors' suggestion that throughout recorded history, our interest in fictions with imaginary worlds has grown. Yet we do not find this surprising, given that advances in technological innovation throughout recorded history have encouraged both production and dissemination of these fictions. What we do find surprising is that evidence of engagement with imaginary worlds stretches back to a time when all of our resources should have gone toward survival. Nevertheless, 41,000-year-old representational images depicting sequential actions on the walls of caves in modern-day Indonesia suggest that we used valuable resources like time, fats, furs, and sticks to record narratives. Given production costs, one might assume these stories to have been realistic, practical. However, these hunting fictions were fantasies, charactered by therianthropes, humanlike figures with animal features. Other prehistoric fantastical creatures unearthed across the globe (e.g., a lion-headed woman in modern-day Germany, the birdman of Lascaux) reinforce the existence of a species-wide drive to engage with fantastical narrative (Aubert et al., Reference Aubert, Lebe, Oktaviana, Tang, Buhran, Jusdi and Brumm2019). Thus, in times when, presumably, securing safety was a constant struggle, humans spun stories to explore imaginary worlds, and this tendency has persisted throughout history.

Though we also acknowledge the appeal of Dabourg and Baumard's argument that external environmental safety increases motivation to explore imaginary worlds, the prevalence of fantastical imagery in Paleolithic cave paintings suggests that these desires are robust even in dangerous or uncertain times. Returning to the present, consider these statistics from the United States in 2020: 11 of the top 20 grossing films were arguably fictions with imaginary worlds (IMDbPro, 2021). Sales of graphic novels (a genre dominated by otherworldly fictions, e.g., Strange Planet and Stranger Planet) jumped 29.1%. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, set in the richly lithographed, chronologized republic of Panem, topped the young adult bestseller list (Hartman, Reference Hartman2021). Now consider the environmental conditions of the United States in 2020: a new pandemic without a cure took 380,000 American lives, and an old way of living had become unsafe. By the authors' argument, one might have expected us to avoid exploratory forays into fictional worlds to concentrate our energies on survival. Instead, we turned to imaginary worlds. We propose that imaginative fictions provide an outlet for exploration that is especially useful precisely when an individual's sense of external safety is threatened.

Fiction affords us the opportunity to cast aside actual circumstances and behave “as if” imaginary circumstances were real. The capacity to simulate is present early in development: children pretend by 18 months (Gopnik, Reference Gopnik2009). With age, this may develop into a tendency to engage with fiction – to read, and to watch movies and television (Bloom, Reference Bloom2010). Though children's effortless navigation of this boundary between real and pretend was once taken as evidence that they couldn't tell the two apart (Piaget, Reference Piaget1929), it is now well-established that children as young as 3 understand fiction as distinct from reality (Woolley, Reference Woolley1997; Woolley & Ghossainy, Reference Woolley and Ghossainy2013). Thus, when we enter a fictional world, though we explicitly believe that the circumstances are fictional, we can implicitly believe – or alieve – that they are real (Gendler, Reference Gendler2008). Our alief enables us to suspend our disbelief and engage with a fictional world – regardless of the conditions of our external reality.

Moreover, when the conditions of external reality are unsafe or aversive, fiction provides opportunities to escape into other realms. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimated that 89% of children who experience sexual abuse create imaginary companions (Sanders, Reference Sanders1992). Children who experience trauma and escape into the relative safety of imaginary worlds seem to fare better than those who experience trauma and don't. Marjorie Taylor tells of Miriam, who created an imaginary companion with otherworldly abilities during her parents' divorce and mother's confinement to a mental hospital, and compares her to her older siblings who did not. While her siblings regressed, experiencing difficulties with school and sleep, Miriam experienced no such disturbances (Taylor, Reference Taylor1999). In subsequent work, Taylor showed that at-risk middle school children who created imaginary companions showed increased adjustment by high school (Taylor, Hulette, & Dishion, Reference Taylor, Hulette and Dishion2010). These findings suggest that the ability to explore challenging issues in a marked safe space separate from reality – especially when reality is unsafe – affords emotional and cognitive benefits.

Even when reality is not unsafe but merely presents an obstacle, fantastical pretense may still confer benefits. Children who pretend to be Batman or Elsa from Frozen persist longer on a potentially frustrating executive function key and lock matching task (White & Carlson, Reference White and Carlson2016); the authors suggest that the psychological distance between self and fantastical character enables children to explore options and perform more successfully in their own lives. Furthermore, Hopkins and Lillard (Reference Hopkins and Lillard2021) suggest that problem solving can be enhanced through fantasy. The authors propose that it is not engagement with surface fantasy – a world superficially dissimilar to ours – that leads to these effects, but engagement with deep fantasy – a world dissimilar to ours where impossible things can happen, not unlike the settings of fictions with imaginary worlds. This is consistent with research suggesting that thinking about fantastical worlds results in myriad psychological outcomes, improving analogical reasoning, reasoning about minds, and information retention (e.g., Dias & Harris, Reference Dias and Harris1990; Lillard & Sobel, Reference Lillard and Sobel1999; Weisberg & Hopkins, Reference Weisberg and Hopkins2020).

Thus, fictions with imaginary worlds, in providing conditions that foster psychological distance and deep processing, may have the potential to uniquely confer adaptive outcomes in the real world. Through offering a world distinct from the real one, imaginative fiction might be more than multisensory cheesecake, not only grabbing attention but also serving as an outlet for simulated exploration regardless of the nature of the external environment.