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I think that yes our imaginations can run away with us. When our minds create something so vivid and interesting that our reality pales in comparison it can become very seductive to spend more and more time there.
From child psychology I remember that children often have trouble controlling emotions and reining themselves back in. When you combine that with their very creative minds it can also carry them away. If, for instance, they see a chair with a large stuffed animal on it in the dark, their imagination thinks it looks like a monster, the become afraid and their imagination takes over and spins it more and feeds into the fear.
Now as the mother of a 4 year old I have had experience with this first hand. It is fairly easy to differentiate between her imagination and her actually seeing something. When she imagines things they are created by the mind therefore generated by things she has a frame of reference for. Such as the cartoons we watch, the stories we read and games we play. So it usually comes out something like talking tools because we watched Handy Manny that day. I am aware of what she has and has not been exposed to, so I know if it is something that she might be spinning. When she sees things they are usually out of that frame. Just last night she was dosing off when she woke for a moment and asked me who that black thing with the face that was standing in Aunt Kit's yard the other day. We haven't read or seen any ghost stories regarding shadows lately. (Additionally both my friend Kit and I have long been aware of the shadow guardian that roams her family's farm. However my daughter was previously unaware, and we have never spoken about him in her presence, in fact I think the last time he came up was before she was even born.) Or the monster in the middle bedroom, who according to my child is tall with dark eyes and has feather horns. (this is a Native American spirit in full regalia that is a guardian of our property, again something my brother, mom and myself have long been aware of, but haven't mentioned in years.)
Yes I think imagination can run away with us, especially young children because they have a harder time controlling their emotions, however it is rather simple to detect whether it is imagination or something else as long as the parent is open to the possible existence of something other.

I think that the energy generated by the emotion is what is giving life and movement to the ‘monster’. So if you change her emotion or attention its animation ceases.



In this type of situation I will look to see if I can see what she is seeing, adjust my way of seeing to look at all the possible, as you would when staring at an optical illusion. If I can’t by any stretch of my sight see the short garbage can as a person, I then wonder what she did see. I will ask her something to describe the person she saw. Boy or girl? Grown up or child? Young or old? I will ask if they looked like they were in a costume. Just to try to find out what she did see, whether it may have been a spirit, ghost, guardian, gnome, pixie, fairy, troll etc. With those details I look to see again, to make sure that what she saw couldn’t be a miscommunication within her mind. Then I make a mental or written note of it. In case one of her cousins, one of our psychically gifted friends or myself see or experience the same in the future.



Perhaps because of the way our minds process shapes and color. When you or I take off our glasses and can’t see the detail of shape or their defining lines our minds perceive no recognizable shapes for the to work with or structure, leaving us with the colors. However when we are able to see shape and color our minds try to organize them into understandable configurations so it takes the visual information it gathers in a glance and tries to piece it together to give us a picture of something that would make sense.

Once after she woke up and said she saw monsters I did sense something there. I told her it would be okay and that I would get Neptune to come in and scare it away. Neptune is our cat who joins us every night at bedtime to put her to sleep. I told her that he will scare away monsters. That night I got Neptune brought him in, set him at the foot of her bed. I sat down on the floor while she went back to sleep then I sent out an energy shield around the room casting out anything that I didn't recognize and know to be a family member or guardian (these generally stay out of sight around her, or will if asked to). The next day I cleansed the room with sage and sweet grass. I usually cleanse our bedrooms once a month anyway just to keep a level of sanity in the household.