Early one Saturday morning in a remote camping spot called the Blowholes, Ellie and stepdad Jake awoke to their worst nightmare—four-year-old daughter Cleo had gone.
A full-scale search of the Blowholes and surrounding area using helicopters, drones, and land and sea found no trace.
Over the next 18 days, a dreadful fear gripped the West Australian State; Cleo Smith was dead.
Against the odds, Cleo’s story has a miraculous ending that would otherwise be the stuff of fiction. They found her alive and well in her abductor’s house.
Unlike real-life dramas, the promise of fiction sees the hero, when faced with impossible odds, come out on top.
Aristotle said that when we watch a tragedy, two emotions come into play: pity (for the character) and fear (for ourselves).
With regard to fiction, psychologist Keith Oatley calls it, “the mind’s flight simulator.” Those of us who read fiction improve our social skills with each recent novel. Oatley’s research found that when we identify with characters found in fiction, we think of their desires and goals, instead of our own.
Fiction gives us the promise that none of the perils faced by fictional characters will happen to us.
To follow a plot requires a skill known as “theory of mind.”
It means that when we read about what a book’s character is thinking, our own brains associate with those feelings.
When we dream, places, people, and emotions appear with no input from our eyes or ears.
Shakespeare likened the way we dream to Prospero in The Tempest when he says about humans “are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum thinks that when we read, we become ‘sympathetic spectators.’ And as such, makes us better people, especially for issues such as justice.
Being able to understand what is going on in the minds of a villain and how it affects our hero makes us finer citizens.
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