fancy as

fancy (someone or oneself) as (something)

To think of or envision someone or oneself in a particular way or role. Sure, I like to dance, but I don't fancy myself as a real dancer by any means. I don't fancy him as any kind of genius, although he would certainly disagree.
See also: fancy
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

fancy someone as someone or something

to imagine that someone were someone else or some particular type of person. Can you fancy her as a zookeeper? I can fancy him as a tall, dark stranger. I really don't fancy myself as a farmer.
See also: fancy
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • for (one's) (own) sake
  • for sake
  • keep (someone or something) in sight
  • keep in sight
  • keep sight of
  • keep sight of (someone or something)
  • keep sight of somebody/something
  • wash (one's) hands of (someone or something)
  • wash one's hands of
  • wash your hands of something/someone
References in classic literature
It is true, I had not yet seen her, but my mesmeritic impulses induced me to fancy as much.
Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief
(5) When read alongside the literature of aeronautics, Smith's sonnet betrays a persistent tension between thinking about fancy as a fictionalizing medium and as a sensory organ of dynamic geographic vision.
(13) Here the air balloon realizes an old poetic trope of fancy as flight.
While eighteenth century philosophers characterized fancy as an abstract creative impulse, Romantic poets understood it as an organ of creative perception that, like the air balloon, moves over the surfaces of things in the world itself.
Duff insists that works of genius require "an extraordinary vivacity of Fancy, which includes a certain degree of volatility, occasioning the mind to start as it were from one object to another, without allowing it time to conceive any of them distinctly...." (27) Revealingly, Duff characterizes fancy as roving within an "aerial" psychological region unchecked by judgment: "there is therefore great scope afforded for the flights of Fancy in this boundless region....
(41) Late eighteenth century prospect poems, then, rely on fancy as a medium of sociability through which a landscape might be explored.
Fancy's eye: Poetic vision and the Romantic air balloon
The Romantic poets William Wordsworth and, more especially, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria distinguished between fancy (a contraction of " fantasy ") and imagination, regarding fancy as merely the ability to use the contents of memory in a decorative or illustrative way; it is the playful faculty of mind.
Fancy and imagination