But when saying "I imagined him standing in the hallway" , the word "saying" is a gerund here so it no longer requires a subject.
Not to be pedantic, but because I find the posts on this site to be of great value to myself as a struggling writer, I want to avoid us spreading a too common misunderstanding.
In your comment, you say that "saying" is a gerund. I'm guessing that you mean that the word "standing" is a gerund as saying is not in the OP's prose.
Gerunds and Participles
Standing, in this case, is not a gerund but a participle. These two are, unfortunately, commonly confused.
A gerund is a verbal that functions as a noun, becoming either the subject or an object in a sentence. An example may be:
Walking is good for you. (Walking is the gerund, acting as a subject.)
I enjoy walking. (Walking is the gerund, acting as the object of enjoy.)
A participle is a verbal that functions as an adjective or adverb.
I spent my day in the woods, walking. (Walking is a participle, functioning as an adverb describing how I spent my day.)
Flip that to: I spent my day walking in the woods, and it becomes a participial phrase, also acting as an adverb. (I think. These may be more adjective than adverb -- important thing is, they're not acting as a subject or object like a gerund would.
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Stood as a Past Participle
This is the bit that I found interesting in the original: it was always grammatically correct if we understood the verbal "stood" to mean that the father had been set in the hallway by some other force. This is because stood is the past participle form of stand. I just don't think that's what was intended.
The Problem with Present Participles (and As as a Conjunction to Boot)
The thing with present participles is that they are all descriptors, not actions. They are describing the subject or the verb; they are not functioning themselves as verbs, but take on the role of adjectives and adverbs. And the sage advice against the overuse of adjectives and adverbs should still stand, even if it is a participle working as such.
Also, there is no action--remember, they are descriptors now--so if you use a list of of them, each description in the list is describing something in one point in time. Unfortunately, though not the case here, we often list off a bunch of actions that need to happen in series using participial phrases. If these actions aren't simultaneous, they should probably be rewritten as a sequence of actual actions with proper verbs.
The same is true with the conjunction form of as. Whatever follows has to be simultaneous. You can use while as a substitution/addition to help with this. Anytime you use as as a conjunction, switch it to while and read it to see if the action in both clauses still makes sense. In the same way, add while to your list of participial phrases:
While I put on my jeans, I imagined him, standing in the hallway, while checking his watch, while tapping his foot.
Don't keep the whiles in there, but notice before you delete them how you can immediately tell if the amount of action that you are describing happening simultaneously is reasonable or ridiculous.
For me, I went through a no -ing endings allowed phase. (Same time as my no -ly endings phase. These were both during my Ayn Rand phase. I'm not sure of which phase I'm the most ashamed.) During that phase, I'd go through and rewrite all my gerund and present participle structures. I still do a search of every chapter for both, but more so to check for the simultaneous action issue. And to zap adverbs.
Sorry to hijack the thread AnyaKimlin.
I just didn't want folks to confuse gerunds and participles, then ended up getting on a roll.
