The Metaphysics of Barney

"Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination, and when he's tall he's what we call a dinosaur sensation."

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Kids in Barney play with him when he's a little stuffed animal and without the use of any magic words he just springs to life, returning to his inanimate form after singing a plethora of arcane nursery rhymes and teaching valuable lessons about fire safety and dental hygiene and the like. I can kind of understand if you are part of a group playing with him when he is little you could imagine him turning huge collectively, but it is still weird that everyone imagines him in the same way and he leads them instead of them deciding what he might be doing. It also strikes me as odd that all adults in the show simply accept Barney at face value as if he is part of their collective imagination as well. They don't ever appear to see him in his stuffed form but only happen upon the scene after he is sensational, as if the children's imagination is so strong they telepathically project it onto the adults. And don't even get me started on Baby Bop and her brother BJ, two other dinosaurs that do not appear to be imaginary at all, as they never appear in stuffed form. Why then should Barney have to appear in stuffed form if they do not? I wish some French intellectual could solve this puzzle for me. The Sesame Street monsters are simply there in the world of Sesame Street, and the "real humans" in the show, adults and children alike, never question their (the monsters') reality. I don't see the point of Barney having to be imaginary at all, as opposed to "being" there all along. I'm also trying to figure out what if anything this has to do with Snuffy on Sesame Street, who used to be Big Bird's imaginary friend but is now real, as if Big Bird willed him into "life", complete with his whole Snuffy family. That took years, but perhaps it paved the way for the Barney kids to appear to be able to will Barney to life immediately for everyone in the show, even those who have never met Barney before. Unless Barney came before "real Snuffy." I guess I should research the order. And nobody ever asks where Baby Bop and BJ come from. I must dust off my cultural criticism texts from college and ponder this question further. Clearly if I decide to return to school I have my dissertation topic.