According to Flavell, Flavell, and Green (1983) and Wellman & Estes (1986), even 3 or 4 year old children are able to distinguish between reality and imagination. However, research by Harris et al. (1991), Subbotsky (1994) and not a few others have shown that 5 or 6 year olds can lose the ability to clearly discriminate between the two. In response to situational or contextual demands, a child's cognition of reality wavers. Such wavering aligns along the axis of age and thus could be described as fluctuation along the vertical axis. On the other hand, in the field of clinical observation of Post-Traumatic Play, where traumatic experience is re-enacted from the victim's point of view as well as that of the assailant's, there are reported cases in which attitudinal differences were stated even though the point of view was the same. These waverings do not align around the age axis; less vertically aligned, their axis is horizontal. With this premise, our present research, as base data for practical case study of play in child-care, proposes a new view of a horizontal fluctuation in the realm of the imagined.
