“One of the reasons many apologists are not nearly as effective as Lewis is that they want the cold granite of reason to do everything. But true reason will collapse before a false imagination. False imagination must be answered by a true imagination, and when that happens, reason can flourish in its native habitat” (Writers to Read, p. 105).
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This is a theme that is picked up in detail by a former pastor of mine, here: http://www.bethinking.org/your-studies/chronicles-of-heaven-unshackled/3-out-of-the-silent-planet
“the ‘baptism of the imagination’ that was to Lewis the goal of the Christian fantasist […] was Lewis’ solution to a problem that faces any contemporary Christian apologetics: unbelief too often arises not from an informed awareness of the evidence, but from a completely closed imagination that cannot conceive of the universe having the added Godward dimension, and so is incapable of giving the matter serious consideration”
I’d quibble a little bit in the sense that unbelief doesn’t “arise from” a closed imagination; it is the natural state of man after the Fall without the intervention of grace. But yes, the closed imagination then forms a fortress against the possibility of belief breaking in, because God is outside the experience of the unbelieving mind, and the unimaginative mind cannot consider anything outside its own experience.
It is simply a particular area of the fall he is speaking of.
I suppose then leprauchans are also outside the experience of the unbelieving mind and the victim of the closed imagination.
Leprechauns or Morgellons, seeing them may not be real, even if other people support your belief.
You embrace the fantasy that your minuscule mind correctly apprehends reality. It does not take much brain-power to posit that like the eye, which is limited to a very small subset of the electro-magnetic spectrum, so too the brain is limited to a very small subset of that which can be comprehended.
Imagination is helpful here. However, like all things fallen, imagination itself can be corrupted or redeemed and sanctified.