A green door in a white wall, with a  creeper trailing about it. You push the door, and find it unlocked. You enter, and discover yourself in a garden of surpassing beauty, where a lovely friend takes you by the hand and leads you to a palace where a wise woman in shows you the book of your life, in which the pictures are all living scenes. In the garden behind the wall, you are a “wonder-happy” child.

When the adults around you pushed you to hurry up and grow up, and stop “making things up”, and get through school, and work, work, work, and make your way in the world, you forgot about the green door, and the beauty behind it – or dismissed all of that as an idle dream. From time to time — usually when you are off your usual path, or totally lost, you come upon that door again. But you have appointments to keep, you’re under deadline, you’re with companions who would not understand … and you pass by the green door, until at last the “keen brightness” goes out of your life, and you lose your appetite for the things you have worked so hard to accomplish.

H. G. Wells evoked this place of true imagination in a wonderful short story simply titled “The Door in the Wall.” We can dismiss the story, and the world it vividly brings to life, as the product of childish fantasy, but to do so would be terribly and utterly wrong.

Each of us has a door to a place of wonder and imagination that is altogether real. The child inside us – or the child we need to bring home to us – knows that door very well.

For me, the door to one of these places is a tunnel that winds through a mountain. On the far side, a path leads through flowering gardens alive with the sounds of water to an amazing building, which combines countless architectural styles without dissonance or confusion, guarded by a gatekeeper who asks newcomers, “What is the correct time?” (To which the only correct answer is, “The time is now.”) Beyond the gatekeeper is a gallery filled with the art and artifacts of many cultures and times. To touch any of these objects is to be transported to the place from which it derived.

Deeper inside the House of Time — that is its name — is a library of which I never tire. Any book in this library opens another world. The librarian appears as a gentle scholar, but sometimes his shadow throws the profile of a long-beaked ibis bird against the wall. Master teachers appear in this library. I come here often, and have guided others to this place. When we have need — and sufficient courage — we can inspect our personal Book of Life.

If we are very lucky, we may chance upon the door to a place of wonder as we travel the physical world. I know a garden gate, approached through an arcade of rambling roses, in a mellow brick wall behind a country house in Gloucestershire that opens into dappled greenwoods where beech trees have voices, and beings of an order of evolution older and other than humans lead busy and colorful lives. You cannot see them or hear them if the “wonder-happy” child in you has gone missing.

I am not sure which is a sadder condition: to have lost the green door, or to open it and find that there is nothing extraordinary on the other side because you have lost the power to imagine.

Adapted from The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.