Anyone who’s been around little girls – parent, older sibling, child care, or babysitter – will know a fundamental fact: the unicorn is a de facto standard for The List of Amazing Things Girls Love. For the adult-aged mind, it can often be hard to grasp the appeal, love, and joyful passion of something so foreign and fantasy-oriented. So asking yourself internally, “But why?” is totally understandable and nothing to be ashamed of, either.
Unicorns are creatures of fantasy (obviously), so let’s explore what “magical” means. For something to be magical, it doesn’t necessarily constitute having a pot of some witch’s brew or holding a powerful amulet. It can be almost anything within imagination that brings benefit (in the form of joy, adventure, wishes, etc.) whilst being outside the realm of reality. When we look at the base animal for a unicorn – a horse – that carries its own appeal too, whether in biological physical structure or in a smaller, cartoon-style form. Think back to the last time you watched a video of horses in action – grazing quietly, grooming each other, or happily running free in a large field. What feelings arose in your heart? Often those can be summed up into a few key words:
Power, Grace, Beauty, Love, Nurture, Care, Wild, Free.
Hence, these same attributes can be found in unicorns, with the horn adding an additional key word: Mystery. Creatures of our imagination are beyond the understanding within reality, so they automatically hold an aura of wonder and mystery, even as the add-ons that make them exhibit said qualities are produced by our own imagination. From an adult-level of thinking, a dozen critical questions will arise, but in the mind of a child, wonder and mystery surrounding a creature of fantasy only fuels the joy of finding something unique and special. And this also ties into self-acceptance, because part of the joy of imagining and believing in a fantasy creature is meeting it with the hope of both sides recognizing each other as someone special, beautiful, unique, and loved for being as such – thereby comes the arrival of the final key word: Friendship.
Dreaming with inner belief is at the core of imagination. Part of having something manifest itself in the mind as being real is believing in its existence initially. Once you have manifest the form of the fantasy being in your imaginative spiritual realm, then the ability to envision other changes and add-ons is boundless. You can make the horn a certain length, have intricate patterns on it, make it shoot laser beams of magic, add a pair of wings… the list goes on forever.
Kids are innocently imaginative, and through dreaming in a fantasy realm, they find creatures of myth and legend, which provide solace, joy, hope, comfort, and love.