When Nature Becomes a Story to Experience Together.
The Imagined Story® is a group (or individual) facilitation methodology that uses Alamar Life natural landscapes as stages of a narrative journey created by the participants.
Nature is usually observed.
In The Imagined Story®, it is experienced from within.
Participants enter the landscapes, choose where to go, imagine characters, build relationships and create what happens beyond the frame.
Nature is no longer only a landscape to contemplate. It becomes a space to experience together.
From the encounter between participants, the facilitator and natural environments, a unique story emerges every time.
The same Nature.
A different journey every time.
Why it works
Nature
Natural landscapes support relaxation, creativity and openness to connection. Nature becomes a familiar and reassuring space where memories, emotions and imagination can emerge spontaneously.
Living Landscapes
Unlike traditional videos, Alamar Life living landscapes can accompany the story for as long as needed. Each scene remains present for as long as the group feels there is still something to experience, imagine or share.
Palette
The facilitator selects a series of natural landscapes and presents them to the group as possible stages of the journey. Participants explore the available possibilities and gradually choose each next step, building the path of the story together.
Narrative Freedom
There is no script. Every choice opens new possibilities, every image suggests different developments, and every group creates a unique story. Nature does not impose a narrative: it offers a world to explore.
Living landscapes allow each scene to be experienced for as long as the story needs, giving participants the time to explore, imagine and create.
How the Story Begins
Before the activity, the facilitator prepares a palette of natural landscapes, selecting around thirty living landscapes from the thousands of clips available in the Alamar Life Care Player or Nature Player.
Trails, forests, streams, waterfalls, flower-filled meadows, lakes, the sea, trees, snow, rain, flowers…
Each image represents a possible stage of the journey.
From that moment on, the journey no longer follows a predetermined route. The participants choose, step by step, where to go and how the story develops.
Every choice opens new possibilities, brings memories to the surface, introduces characters and changes the direction of the narrative.
The facilitator does not lead the story: they accompany it. If the group imagines environments different from those initially selected, the facilitator can quickly bring new landscapes from the Alamar Life catalogue into the experience, adding them to the palette and allowing the journey to continue wherever the participants’ imagination takes it.
Thanks to thousands of living landscapes and an intuitive search system, the story never encounters limits.
Every new idea finds its own landscape.
A trail leads to a stream.
Someone notices that all streams eventually reach the sea.
The group decides to continue towards a beach.
On the horizon, clouds appear and someone imagines a storm approaching.
The group searches for shelter.
A little later, a blackberry bush inspires the idea of making jam.
Each new image opens a possibility, and the story changes direction following the imagination of the group.
Nature is not the background of the story. It is the place where the story comes to life.
What Happens During the Journey
Some stories remain entirely within the imagination. Others bring back childhood memories, local traditions, distant journeys, songs and emotions that had been forgotten.
Some participants create small animals and give them names. Others build imaginary villages, rediscover a moment from their own life or express wishes, fears and emotions that naturally find a place within the story.
Every participant crosses the same landscape, but experiences it through their own inner world. This is why every story becomes unique.
Because the narrative develops through imaginary characters — the fisherman, the woodcutter, the farmer, a child, an animal — rational barriers naturally become softer. People rarely speak about themselves directly, but they often entrust characters within the story with deeper aspects of their inner world.
The story therefore becomes a space for symbolic exploration, where aspects of personality that might not easily emerge in direct conversation can find a natural form of expression.
Narrative imagination creates a protected space in which people can reveal parts of themselves without having to speak directly about themselves.
Nature Does Not Impose a Story: It Offers a World to Explore.
The Role of the Facilitator
In The Imagined Story®, the person does not have to follow the story.
The story follows the person.
The facilitator does not guide a story that has already been written. They accompany the way the group discovers it.
The facilitator:
- prepares the palette;
- observes;
- listens;
- encourages new directions;
- welcomes each contribution;
- follows the group;
- preserves the thread of the story.
In The Imagined Story®, the person does not have to follow the story.
The story follows the person.
Areas of Application
- Healthcare
- Education
- Psychology
- Art Therapy
- Dance Movement Therapy
- Training
- Team building
Every participant follows the same path, but the journey they experience is unique.
From Workshop to New Applications
In 2018, The Imagined Story® was presented during a workshop at the Meeting delle Professioni di Cura in Piacenza, attracting the interest of educators, psychologists and professionals working in helping relationships.
That experience opened new reflections on its possible applications within supportive and care contexts.
During the discussion that followed, two educators who had taken part in the workshop developed the idea of integrating this methodology with the Validation® Method, opening new perspectives for its use in working with people living with dementia.
The journal Cura later dedicated an article to this integration in its June 2022 issue.
An Open Tool
The Imagined Story® is only one of the possibilities offered by the Alamar Life Care Player and Nature Player.
Thanks to the landscape palette, each professional can create personalised pathways, design their own sequences and use natural environments as a support for artistic workshops, theatre activities, educational programmes, therapeutic interventions, training or group work.
The images provide a shared language upon which each discipline can build its own approach.
The Theoretical Foundations
The Imagined Story® is based on the meeting of two fields of knowledge.
On one side, research on the effects of exposure to natural environments shows that viewing natural landscapes can support relaxation, attention restoration, emotional regulation and openness to social connection. These effects are described in particular by Roger Ulrich’s Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) and Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (ART).
On the other side, The Imagined Story® draws inspiration from some principles of narrative projective techniques, such as Henry Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The spontaneous creation of a story can bring forth relational patterns, symbolic meanings, memories, emotions and personal experiences that naturally emerge through narration.
Unlike the TAT, however, The Imagined Story® is not designed as a diagnostic tool. It is an immersive, relational and creative experience in which the well-being promoted by natural landscapes supports the narrative process, fostering a climate of listening, participation and spontaneous expression.
Field Experiences
The applications of The Imagined Story® reveal much more than theory.
Children, people living with dementia, artistic workshops, therapeutic groups and educational pathways have given rise, over the years, to many different experiences.
Discover the case studies in the dedicated news article.