This post originally ran on June 26, 2012. Since then, the researchers have published some of the results of their work with imaginary worlds. I’ve included this (along with making a few other edits) below. My own experience of imaginary friends has also expanded, now that we have two new boys named Pumpernickel and Garbanzo living in our house, alongside all the real ones.
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I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years .
And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and I picked each name—there was Stormlight, that one’s Mackintosh—as they came down the hall.
There was also one with a rainbow coat. Another had an eggplant-colored mane. A few could even fly.
As you might have guessed, these horses weren’t something anyone else could see. Only the two of us watched them canter along the nubby hallway carpet. We’d been kept inside, away from the empty lot behind my friend’s back fence, where we had a world called Orak. There, dwarves crouched in tree stumps and elves reached into their quivers for silver arrows. Now our world had come to us. Continue reading
It’s October, the start of a new water year. A water year is one of several ways to measure rainfall. This way, water year 2016 starts now–when we hope the rain will begin–and will end in September. A rainfall year runs from July to June, a buffer of dry season on either side of when the rain might come. Other places just use a calendar year, from a cross-your-fingers-that-its-rainy January, to summer dryness, then rain again, we hope. We hope. 
