Heavenly creatures.

When I was four years old, I had imaginary friends. They had names like Pasta, Dr ABC, and Nurse Orange. Pasta spoke to me, and he used to fly beside our car. My child has imaginary friends, too. One is a small mouse named Darcy, who is the same size as your pinky fingernail.

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Not long ago, I finally watched "Heavenly Creatures", directed by New Zealand’s own Peter Jackson. "Heavenly Creatures" is the precursor to "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Lovely Bones". (There is a theme about imaginary worlds running through Jackson’s work.) "Heavenly Creatures" is based on a true story that happened in 1950s New Zealand. Two teenage girls retreated into an imaginary and obsessive world, and it turned fatal. A young Kate Winslet stars. (Winslet is one of my favourite actors.)

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I always have lived in imaginary worlds. When I was five years old, I started writing stories and scripts. I would create elaborate plots for my Barbie dolls. At night, when it was time to go to sleep, I would act out all the parts in my stories. During the day, I would direct my long-suffering brother and my friends on the school playground and in the neighbourhood.

Now I am the woman in the car who is talking to herself. While I am driving (I don’t have a radio), I have imaginary conversations with people. I write letters and emails that I will never send. I walk around the village, listening to my MP3 player, and I pretend that I am in a music video.

Blogging and other forms of social media are like having imaginary friends. But you reply. You respond. I am not having a conversation with myself. You are robots, or you are real.

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Imagine a post-apocalyptic world. The ice caps and glaciers have melted. The last humans are living under small bio-domes, scattered all over this world. Sometimes we might risk everything, and leave the safety of the domes, to swim in chemical seas filled with mutant sharks and terrorist pirates who want to harvest our organs. More often though, we remain in the fortresses provided by the domes. We plug ourselves into an alternate reality, where we all are connected online. Being online consumes our energy and leaves us physically and mentally wasted, and yet we cannot stop ourselves. We have avatars who live in this imaginary world, because we primates need the connections we find there.