Disney Imagineer Barry Braverman on the today show in 1982. He asserts the schematic for imagination is a three step process: gathering, storing and recombining into new things.
All Disney themes have a subtext, and the narrow scope lesson of the Figment pavilion is that autonomous ideas can be made to self-replicate over a long term layering of the imagination schematic. Not all gathering is done externally. One’s own idea can be stored for years before being recombined into a new one, and so on. It’s multi-generational creativity. If you can make your ideas self-aware you can eventually stop thinking.
The obvious metaphor is that Barry created the Dreamfinder character, who created Figment; and Figment is being taught to create on his own.
