What Are Imagined Lines?

When we hear the word line, many of us think of something straight — a path, a border, or a sequence. But not all lines are visible, and not all are straight. In my work with movement and language, I use the term imagined lines to describe the traces we feel, track, or extend when we move, listen, or speak. These are not imaginary lines — they are not "not-there" — but rather forms of felt structure that shape how we perceive and respond to the world.

Imagined lines show up in many places. A dancer sweeping their arm leaves a trace in space, one we feel even if we can’t see it. Many people walking across a park make this imagine line visible—called a desire line. A bird in flight draws a path we follow with our eyes. A child reciting lines of poetry is tracing something with their voice, held in rhythm and breath. These are all examples of what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone calls linear patterns — the "traces of gestures or pathways the body makes in space while moving" (2009b, 295). Different than linear designs, which describe more sculptural forms of the body in space, a linear pattern is sensed, remembered, or imagined. These imagined lines also show up in how we think and speak. When we say things like “get to the point,” “follow your train of thought,” or “trace an idea,” we’re using spatial metaphors to describe mental processes. The lines here exist in different ways. Imagined lines might be “fictive motion, remembered motion, cognitive mappings or spatial relations in the mind’s eye.” We often think of time as an imagined line, exemplified when listening to music. The music feels like it traces a path, journeys over a landscape as it progresses through time.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to “ghost lines” — the lines we draw in our imagination when connecting two points in space. But he also reminds us that many lines “seem to wiggle free of any classification,” resisting being pinned down, even in a world that values straightness and clarity (Ingold, 2007, 50). These are the kinds of lines that matter in embodied experience. They are how we orient, how we anticipate, how we know our place within movement, within speech, and within each other.

Imagined lines matter because they give form to the intangible. They connect the inner and outer, the verbal and the bodily. In listening, they might appear as the arc of attention — reaching toward another person’s words — or the subtle motion of understanding forming in response. In movement, they are the pathways that shape how bodies take up space and time. In both, imagined lines are what let us feel the presence of something not fully visible, yet deeply shared.

Imagined lines aren’t just something we can't see — they’re how we connect.