en·trance n. A means or point by which to enter.

We speak of the imagination as someplace sealed, hermetic. A toy-shop out of which come “works” that dazzle and amaze. It is the black box of proverb, the sealed container inside which mysteries are made. If imagination were made manifest we could sense it: a palm pressed against the surface would find it textured, warm, a faint pulse throbbing like a muffled drum; an ear to the locked door would detect the clockwork whir of gearing, the shutter-click, the flap flap flap of film. And yet we wait most of our lives outside it, we pace the perimeter in search of entry, some doorway in to this (grey) matter of the mind.

For a small boy the movies were imagination. Indistinguishable, one fed the other in an Ourobouros worm. Each Saturday we made our regular parade, my cousin Tim and I, to worship at the Cedar V Theatre, Lynn Valley’s local Church of the Cinematic Mind. A half-cylinder Quonset hut of corrugated steel it was a wonderland, a beacon. In our minds’ eyes we saw its bat-signal calling us from blocks away, a klieg light on the clouds. It pulled us in like moths to fire. With dozens of our peers we queued impatiently for entry, our hand-hot 25 cent coins as payment for an Admit One ticket, our visa to that other, inner world. A small price to gain admission to our souls.

Inside was bedlam! Inmates and intimates, we were all one in an unsupervised, an elemental swirl. Restless energy. Bouncing from each other like whizzing atoms. The cacophony! The shouting row to row! The scuffles and derision, with popcorn lobbed through the air like slow-motion stones. Licorice Nibs, and Strawberry Twizzlers, and Aero bars, and chips. Feet stuck to flooring by spilled 7-Up and Coke.

And then the lights would dim, and darkness flooded through the room like water quenching fire as we settled in our seats, Tim and I, the sounds around us subsiding to a soft sizzling, as close to silence as that theatre would ever come.

From somewhere in the black above we’d hear the clack-clack-clatter of the projector getting underway, and then the stuttering stab of light that sprayed images upon the screen before our eyes. Before our very eyes…

And what images! The nyuk-nyuk Stooges with their fork-fingered eye-jabs, their noggin-bops; Robinson Crusoe on Mars, sitting tensely in our seats as the spaceship crash-landed on a barren planet. Or Godzilla would be roaring at us, beating defiance on his giant-lizard chest, Tokyo the battleground, skyscrapers tumbling like dominoes as he and Mothra slugged it out to death. Death or intermission, whichever one came first. Laser weapons, monsters, aliens: what more could you ever want from a Saturday matinée!

It was darkness in daytime, and we would have stayed in there forever if we could. Hoarding those last licorice Nibs, writhing with one leg twined around the other in an effort to stave off that desperate pre-intermission rush to the bathroom in the lobby. Willing to risk peed-in-pants disgrace so as not to miss the climactic scene when Godzilla belches fire, and an entire Japanese tank brigade is melted down to screaming slag.

And so we spent our Saturdays, my cousin Tim and I. Profligate with those afternoons as if the supply could never be depleted. As if we would be forever granted entrance. As if we never would grow old.

But each week “The End” would flicker on the screen, the credits scrolling up towards the roof, and we would be left with a fading horde of images cached inside our heads. And then the lights would rise, and we would rise with them, reborn from our foam flip-seat wombs. Hauled unwilling out of darkness. Emerging: restless, cat-calling, dazzled — from our imagination. Outside ourselves again.

Most of us in those matinées were mere consumers, devouring projected images as if they were kindling and we were white hot flame. We never asked where they came from. We never stopped to wonder just who had conjured up these wonders for our delight. We only asked that there be more of them; that each Saturday the Cedar V marquee would offer yet another double bill of marvel and amazement.

But some among us got it. Some saw the cone of light and knew. Knew that the bulb had passed light through some writer’s head. They knew, then, that they might make such magic too. Might feel the projector-bulb’s light pass through them: the head a prism, the white light split and refracted in its passage through the brain, a rainbow extracted from the mono-coloured beam.

As adults we watch movies trying to find the way inside again. And on some rare evenings we are granted entrance. To see Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s City of Lost Children, for example, is to recognize a familiar face from some matinée of long ago. He and I were in the Cedar V together: I’m sure of it. But he managed to stay behind while Tim and I filed out, blinking, into the bright sunlight of a Lynn Valley afternoon.

What we learned together in those darkened hours so many years ago was that we were flammable. We had fuel inside us. To watch those matinées was to have our heads hinged open, to feel a lit match tossed inside. To be set ablaze.

en·trance tr.v. (1) To put into a trance. (2) To fill with delight, wonder, or enchantment.