We got to where we are because we are a rational, thoughtful animal. But those thoughts are of particular kinds – the kinds that come to us because of our nature. The kinds that make sense of the outside world by using our senses. The kinds our brains can comprehend. The kinds that we can couch in the languages our rationality has created. We are also prisoners of our thinking in the same way that the spanner is a prisoner to the nut because its shape is dictated by the shape of the nut it is made to tighten or loosen, so our ways of thinking are designed to make sense of the world as we see it, and we see it as a world that makes sense only with the rational tools we have created to make sense of it.
There is a circularity to our reason which has given rise to ideas like, ‘how do we know this is not all a dream?’ Is there a way to break out of our reasoning natures and find news ways to understand and comprehend? It is of course impossible to stop being what we are except in our imaginations. There we can make up all sorts of things some of which do not need a language to explain them, many of which are impossible in our objective world.
But our imagination is a vital counterweight to the weight of our logic, and we do ill to children to tell them to get rid of it.