DS5 is almost constantly imagining something different than reality. His teachers like him and he is doing okay at school so I think it is at least manageable there.
Here are some examples:
He was cleaning rocks before putting them in his rock polisher machine. Instead of just thinking about how many, what type, or even just thinking about what he is actually doing, he cooks up a story that he says aloud to himself (I was could hear from another room). The rocks were actually a rock family, there was dialogue between the rocks with different accents, they had fears of being separated from the rocks we didn't collect, concerns over being made clean when they preferred to be dirty, they had complaints that the tumbling machine makes them dizzy. It went on and on and on.
We were on a hike but according to him we were being digested. The trail was the digested system and things we saw along the way were organs that did various things to us. Eventually we made it to the toilet (aka our car).
We were at the dog park with our dog. We have had our dog for two years. We are walking along and he suddenly starts pretending that our dog is a stray. That we were in this park and this friendly dog without an owner came up to us.
I was washing a pan. He was next to me saying, "Blah, this soap taste awful. No. Not the sprayer! Argh, it is cold! Ahh...the towel. Now that feels nice. It is like getting a massage before being put to bed on the shelf". When I asked him what he was saying he said, "I wasn't talking. It must have been the pan you heard"
He is "in character" a lot. He loves dressing up. No object is ever just what it really is for long.
I get that he is 5 and I don't mean to sound like a grump but this is near constant. I would like to sometimes have him in reality.
If I tell him "We are done being digested. Lets enjoy the hike and talk about what we really see", he'll sulk.
I will say if the experience is new, he'll be more involved in reality. So hiking in the forest is old news and open for embellishment so that slug is an intestinal parasite but checking out tide pools is a new experience so the limpet gets to stay a limpet (for now).
Anyone else have a kid like this?
It is kind of exhausting.
