In Disneyland near Paris one summer, I felt saturated with someone else's fantasies, someone else's objects. Some of the fantasies were also my own, but I recognised images from childhood only as if they had been refracted through a distorting lens that another person operated. Some were those of my sons, then aged twelve and sixteen, who were able to play in a cynical distance from the images, to both enjoy and parody what lay around them. Many of the fantasy objects, however, belonged to the Disney Corporation who managed to maintain a no less cynical distance from its customers as it extracted large amounts of money for personalised souvenirs, memories made and retailed for us to retell. We survived inside Disney's world from eight in the morning, with extra earlier entry for hotel customers, to eleven at night, when we staggered back after the music and fireworks finale.

Fantasy enjoys a divided double existence inside and outside the modern mind. It is something that feels personal and idiosyncratic, and it also circulates around us in representations that are shared by many others. Perhaps it was always so, to an extent, with the internal and internalized private fantasies about death and survival for each medieval citizen, for example, being matched by collective public fantasies about mortality and heaven. But the degree to which fantasy is systematically gathered and marketed, researched and turned into systems of commodities, is qualitatively greater now.