Counterfactual thinking is a term of psychology that describes the tendency people have to imagine alternatives to reality. Humans are predisposed to think about how things could have turned out differently if only..., and also to imagine what if?. Counterfactuals are conditional propositions, containing an antecedent and a consequence (e.g., If Matt had run, he would have caught the bus.)
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“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)