This semi-autobiographical essay explores the representation and performance of imaginative inquiry practices in educational inquiry and other disciplines, with particular reference to ‘thought experiments’ in the natural sciences and comparable practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The author shares a number of experiences of writing as a mode of educational inquiry, with particular reference to narrative experiments inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s figuration of the rhizome – a process characterised as rhizosemiotic play – and demonstrates the generativity of intertextual readings of selected fictions in catalysing them.