What is imagination?

Hi there, this is my first post on this website and I figured i'd just share some thoughts and maybe contribute to a discussion :)

I was talking a plane two days ago, coming back from holidays from somewhere sunny and the depression from getting back to city life, its routine and work... and I ended up looking out side the window out of boredom and I noticed the clouds were particularly amazing that day. I took two pictures myself (forgive the quality!) because I ended up staring during the whole flight imagining things as the shapes draw along.

And here is another one :

Here is the failed image that i took for the last one to show you that i was indeed in a plane (you can see the window on that one) :

I mean you can imagine so many things from the shapes and just let your imagination flow. For example on the first picture I see the entrance to a vast kingdom on the far back with something mystical about it, like something from the Lord of the Rings! There would be some green hills and trees on.

The second picture I would see a large dinosaur coming out of the ground (on the down right of the picture) , with a bridge to his left and a river passing by.

The thing is when I got out of the plane I got curious and asked myself, how do we get there? How do we even start thinking or imagining those things?

I suppose it goes the same way for an artist drawing or painting whatever goes on in his mind.

Doing my research on the subject, I came across a wonderful quote from Albert Einstein on Wikipedia that said

'Imagination ... is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world '

I suppose he is certainly right, when you consider knowledge and imagination as two rubber bands, imagination would be stretched to infinity whereas knowledge would just another super long elastic band that could probably break at some point if you stretch it too much.

Although, my perception of imagination makes it quite limited in its own way. We, humans aren't that creative by nature. We imagine things, forms , scenarios, shapes from what he have already seen in the past whether you remember it or not. Your subconscious 'absorbs' all it seems to give birth to what you create in your own mind.

Let me give you an analogy: most of the science fiction is made from a human perception of what the future could be. When its not very realistic you just see more polished designs or gadgets that you would think of today that might make your life easier tomorrow. Creatures usually have limbs, frightening features like serpent-like skin or big claws like a child would make nightmares about. Matrix for example, two minutes on google will reveal to you that it is one of the biggest rip-offs of film history. As mind-fucking, futuristic as it might have seemed, the ideas already existed before.

All the features of what we might dislike yet the alien does have two legs and two hands and an extra tail. It doesnt really feel truely imaginative.

So what is true imagination that knows no limits? Countless artists throughout mostly the 19th-20th century have shown through different art movements (cubism, surrealism, dadaism, fauvism and so on..) that imagination and representation of imagination was more broad that one might have thought, and one shouldn't limit him or herself to classical school of thoughts and should break the boundaries of what we can represent or imagine.

Wolfgang Paalen, 1937 Surrealism

Also knowledge, isn't that limited. Its always ever expanding. Every day that you wake up, you will most likely learn something new, thus expanding your knowledge. Some people learn more than others, developping further, and this knowledge is passed along to be broadened further and further. Doesn't that make knowledge infinite?

I suppose you could simply say like there are different order and sizes of infinities, that imagination belongs to a bigger infinity than knowledge does. Maybe that it is not the case.

There might be a paradox there, something to think about!