Reviewed by Athena A. Drewes
Children’s exceptional experiences are often overlooked in the parapsychological literature. Nevertheless, “the interesting fact that emerges from studying children’s experiences”, as Dr. Louisa Rhine (1968), “is that their experiences, though simpler, still are similar both in form and type to those of adults” (p. 150). More than 55 years later these words are still relevant. We can learn much from children’s reports of exceptional experiences. While children are often overlooked as a viable subject pool for psi experiments, there has been over 100 years of research conducted with children along with anecdotal material amassed (Drewes & Drucker, 1991; Drewes, 2002).
Anecdotal reports of exceptional experiences from everyday people are a good resource for analyzing patterns and trends on a variety of paranormal experiences of both adults and children. Such anecdotal reporting is seen in the writings of Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson on past-life reports of children; Melvin Morse and Raymond Moody on children and adult’s near-death experiences; Sally Rhine Feather’s book on everyday people’s experiences, and Louisa Rhine’s letter collection of exceptional experiences sent to her to name just a few. Rhine, herself, felt the letters were useful in suggesting how researchers should proceed and see if these cases could help illuminate what the psi process was and for study under controlled conditions (Rao, 1986). She was clear in her view that spontaneous phenomena had a place in the scientific literature as well.
Louisa Rhine (1961) made a compelling argument for studying spontaneous experiences stating that “the people who have experienced ESP need to understand what has gone on” (p. 20). She further wrote that
... similarities show up among these experiences, even though they come from people so widely different and unconnected. More than that, through patterns of similarities one can glimpse in the background a rationale that could hardly be the result of only a series of mistakes of testimony, over-interpretation, imagination, co-incidence and all that. Instead, it could be the visible sign of a reality (p. 22).
One can only speculate the reasons as to why so little research is conducted or anecdotal material collected on children as compared to that accumulated to date on college students and adults. Donna Maria Thomas tries to answer that question and counter it with a new interpretation framework of exceptional experiences based on the most recent findings in the field of consciousness research.
Thomas, who lives in Blackburn, United Kingdom, has spent over 18 years researching children through the art of engagement and listening to them as they relay their exceptional experiences. She also has a special interest in the nature of self and anomalous experiences in children formed out her own near-death experience at age fifteen. Thomas is a Research Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom where she leads a research study exploring the nature of self and experience with children and teens. Her qualifications are impeccable. She published an article in the Journal of Parapsychology last year (Thomas, 2022).
So, it is very exciting to read the work of a kindred spirit who also values and views children and their unexplained exceptional experiences as important, valid and worthy of attention. She prefers to listen to them and let them guide her on their journey rather than use them in experiments. Written in the first person with an easy-reading style, the material is heavy with references and philosophical points. At times the reader needs to pause and ponder on the ideas being posited.
This book is jammed-packed with only 11 chapters. I enjoyed reading and seeing how Thomas weaves a web of analyses in trying to explain childhood exceptional experiences that covers the contexts of culture, consciousness and the nature of self. The result is an attempt to come up with a new paradigm for understanding the mystery of being human and the nature of reality within post-materialist science and philosophy.
Spontaneous cases, and especially those of children, seem to defy materialist assumptions about space, time and reality. Children’s spontaneous exceptional experiences are similar to those reported by adults: telepathy, premonitions, peak and out-of-body experiences, seeing spirits, as well as reporting imaginary companions and alternate realities, which she reports on and addresses. But children and teens, suffer more when they report these exceptional experiences to adults and parents. The first chapter, The Grand Narratives of Children’s Unexplained Experiences, addresses this issue in Western culture which ostracizes, incarcerates or institutionalizes, and medicates, creating mental health issues and personality changes in contrast to the culture of First World Peoples. Children, Thomas, states resonate more with ancient paradigms such as Celtic connections, human, natural and divine worlds. Modern television shows sensationalize children’s experiences and give unhelpful language to their experiences, such as “you’re haunted,” “captured by negative spirits”, or “vampired” by other people’s energy, or disregard the children’s view and statements that “these things are real” (p. 21), which only adds to the confusion and discomfort of their experiences. As Thomas states “the experiences reported by children are very real to them, to the point where they can affect their relationships with others and the world” (p. 29). The children she spoke with shared their experiences risking being called crazy or shutting down, with no rewards given. This chapter is rich in examples of children’s experiences and give us insight into their world and felt experiences.
Chapter 2, Culture, Children and Unexplained Experiences, focuses on culture and how it plays an important role in how children’s unexplained experiences are understood and supported. Thomas proposes that our Western culture and its modern social systems (education and health) are informed by a materialistic paradigm rooted in physical science. She looks at a variety of cultural responses to exceptional experiences and contrasts the modern age of technology with the large majority of children sampled globally immersed in cyberspace and social media on a regular basis. Thomas sees videogaming like meditation or prayer and being able to catalyze “higher levels of consciousness.” Unfortunately this chapter lacks examples from the children, and being able to hear the children’s ‘voices’ would have helped to underscore some of the points made.
Chapter 3, A History of Unexplained Experiences in Childhood, offers us a review of research and books that focus on children’s fraudulent psi experiences, legitimate experiences of children and babies, school-based studies, and imaginary playmates. Thomas urges research to “account for metaphysical assumptions and sociocultural influences that intersect with how children experience self, others and the world” (p. 60). Unfortunately, this chapter does not mention nor delve into the renowned mediums, who often as children first had experiences seeing spirits and how they received a lot of negative reactions from friends and family and little support that profoundly impacted their entire lives. Their retrospective view of growing up psychic is insightful and underscores the need to change how society, culture, mental health and health materialist views negatively impact children today.
Chapter 4, New Studies in Unexplained Experiences in Childhood, is a Who’s Who of research, highlighting the studies of Stevenson and Tucker, on reincarnation; Powell’s work with savant autism and telepathy; Sheldrake and colleagues’ study of the feeling of being stared at and research on near-death experiences (NDEs) reported by Atwater and Sutherland. This latter study reports how the children’s NDEs transformed them resulting in feeling different from family and friends, with increased creativity, electrical sensitivity, and synesthesia. Thomas offers up her own viewpoints and opinions and starts to address the answer as to why children are not researched. She raises the pros and cons of the research, and ethical concerns, with no informed consent of children. She stresses how mainstream science, academia and health institutions still are resistant to using evidence from these studies to inform policy and practice. Thomas advocates for forming a strong alliance between them and researchers to share different approaches and disciplinary knowledge and to learn from each other, and to have qualitative and participatory approaches with children. The goal is that children’s unexplained experiences can inform how we understand nature of self, mind and reality, thus trying to answer the question of who and what are we.
Chapter 5, A Return to Unexplained Experiences with Children, advocated for participatory research as the primary data and source of expert authority. She recounts her 18 years of research experiences working with babies, children and teens in all varieties of settings and personal life experience. Thomas places people at the heart of her research practice and values children’s knowledge and living experiences as valuable research data. Thomas knows how to get down to the level of children, using non-verbal means, toys and play, to help the child to share their experiences. She doesn’t just focus on research she has obtained but speculates into the deeper aspects of the mind and who we are universally.
Thomas shares frequencies of children’s unexplained experiences with seeing beings or animals that others can’t see, having out-of-body experiences, and unusual or lucid dreams forming the majority of reports. And we get an abundance of insights into the children’s experiences and hear their ‘voices’ as they report their experiences and experiential reactions.
She writes of symbols and how they are represented across time and cultures, reflecting expanded perceptions of self and reality. Thomas posits that there three different ways for thinking about unexplained experiences of children: mental disorders, psychic abilities and expanded human cognition or everyday experiences. Unexplained experiences are an extension of our natural human cognitive and perceptual experiences, and Thomas delves into the deeper questions of the nature of self, mind, matter and reality in children’s unexplained experiences in relation to self, consciousness and reality.
Chapter 6, Unexplained Experiences of Children and the Nature of Self, makes this an untraditional book that is straightforward tackling an understanding of children’s exceptional experiences. This chapter is much more ‘academic’ and there is a lack of examples from children’s reports of experiences. The author begins the descent into her personal philosophy and ideas. She looks at Piaget’s child development theory and the view of contemporary writers who expand upon his viewpoint: Oswell, Wilber, Taylor, among others.
Thomas also writes about her 2019 “Who Am I” study, looking at the conceptual self, transpersonal self, and know I. She sees peak experiences as the individual dissolved and replaced with an expanded sense of being one with the universe. The transpersonal self is found in telepathy, out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, past life memories, voice hearing and premonitions. The conceptual self is engaged with other beings, seeing lights, hearing strange noises. Thomas sees the past twenty years as a renaissance of ideas about self, knowledge, what is, how we find out.
Chapter 7, Children’s Unexplained Experiences and States of Consciousness, deepens this discussion into a long discourse about play, dreams, and states of consciousness. Children are seen as entering an altered state, meditative and transcendent, during play as well as during exceptional experiences. Children report time as nonlinear, non-linguistic, and metaphorical. She sees dreams as erratic and spatial. Interestingly, Thomas fails to mention the dream telepathy experiments conducted by Charles Honorton, Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman. Their work and writings further expounds on some of her concepts.
Chapter 8, Children and the Collective Consciousness, tackles weighty topics requiring one to take small bites, then needing to pause and ponder in order to digest these huge chunks of complex philosophical concepts. Thomas addresses the collective consciousness and unconscious, bringing in Jung’s theories of children, the work of Grof, prenatal and transpersonal aspects of the psychic. Thomas sees children as having come into a world of collective phenomena accessed before they came physically into the world, thereby resulting in having past life memories and wisdom beyond their capacities. She references Rupert Sheldrake and his study of knowing someone is staring at them from behind, due to a morphic resonance and the morphic field. And Petrenko’s views that access to historical memory of all events and deeds, a genetic memory, can be accessed through meditation as the unconscious has no spatial or temporal coordinates. Unfortunately we go afield of the more concrete and illuminating sharing of the children themselves, as we wade through the weighty philosophical ponderings.
Chapter 9, Medical Conditions and Unexplained Experiences of Children, looks at Stevenson’s work on where reincarnation and biology intersect, Eloise Shields’ school studies with children with disabilities and communication difficulties, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder (PANS/PANDA) and “possession syndrome”, whereby children hear voices, have visions, and intrusive thoughts. The works of: Bourguignon and possession cases; Cohen seeing possession as a complex series of patterns of thinking and behavior; King’s research studying epilepsy in the United Kingdom, seeing it as a transpersonal experience, moving through a portal to different realities; Yehuda’s epigenetics with the transmission of trauma/PTSD across generations, and Dossey’s work on healing abilities as neglected aspects of NDEs are all brought in to address medical conditions and children’s unexplained experiences.
Chapter 10, Children’s Unexplained Experiences and Post Materialist Science, focuses on the conflict with dominant physicalist worldview whereby everything/experience can be reduced to physicalism. A complete physical explanation for reality. Carr, Hoffman, Radin offer new visions of the world and our relation to it. Hoffman’s causality; Newton with observable facts; Kastrup’s view that the physical and narrative defines the mainstream view; Hameroff and Penrose’s view of the brain producing consciousness, microtubule, with quantum wave functions; James’ transmissive model, with consciousness filtered through the brain; Eccles, Persinger and Rouleau, Koren and Persinger, Huxley, Barad, Gillis and Deleuze, Hoffman, Metzner and Carr are all here with their array of philosophies addressing what is reality, consciousness and self. It is in this chapter that Thomas gets to the meat of her thinking and personal views in trying to make sense of children’s exceptional experiences.
She resonates with Bernard Carr’s model of “three mental spaces”. She sees three senses of the self: normal space (the conceptual self); paranormal space (transpersonal self) and the transpersonal space (transpersonal self). Children’s selves and unexplained experiences correspond then to different mental spaces that model the universe. Premonitions exist in memory space, which supports Ehrenwald’s view that psi abilities are an extension of normal human perception and fit with Powell’s savant children and telepathy. If memory space holds past and future memories, they can be experienced then through physical senses accessible to children. Thomas states that our “selves” may be multidimensional, not far from Gidden’s view of social identities that are fluid and multiple.
Thomas advocates for new ways of thinking scientifically about the nature of matter and the role consciousness which could then start to inform a new model for situating children’s unexplained experiences and meanings they assign to them. She sees the universe as entangled – all minds and bodies are inter-connected.
Chapter 11, Philosophy and Children’s Unexplained Experiences, sees children as natural philosophers. They are a mix of the concrete and abstract, intuitive theists as Kelemen saw them. He saw the natural world as a product of a nonhuman agent. Evans’ research found children show bias towards intentional acts of how species originate and favored creationist acts about the natural world. Thomas states that the question is never posed as a starting point, what do we mean by reality? Scholars have a preconceived idea rooted in materialism. Thomas tries to pull things together by bringing in an assortment of post-materialist scholars. Velman advocates a reflexive monism with two ontological categories for the basis of reality – mental and material – both held in reflexive relationship. Semantic differences are considered, with complexity theorists defining consciousness as the property of the brain and emerging from complicated activity while the reductionists see consciousness as nothing more than the function of the brain.
But Arendt’s experiential authority is that theorizing can only come out of the living experience and it’s a guidepost. Albahani, perennial philosophy, looked at the lived experience of mystics and addresses materialism, panpsychism and cosmopsychism. Harris sees us having two selves – one autobiographical and the other an illusion. The channeled entity Seth sees I-ness as a hallucination with the self as a bundle of perceptions, and the outcome changing all the time. Philosophies of Matthew and Shani, Kastrup and others are brought in adding to the mix.
Thomas proposes finding a view of reality that can account for children’s unexplained experiences, ways of being. She feels that people are ready to accept and embody new ways of being, experiencing and expressing who we are in the world. She begins to try formulating one, resonating with the view that the experiencer is the field of consciousness. Consciousness divides into multiple centers of awareness – human beings, animals, other living entities, “alters” of a universal mind at large. Each alter has a private qualitative field with porous boundaries. She goes on to say that children have more permeable boundaries than adults and therefore can access larger fields – collective consciousness, shared dreams or premonitions.
While Thomas covers a lot of the existing philosophies and viewpoints about the nature of reality and consciousness, it does not tackle any spiritual possibilities of a higher being, spiritual contact or shared information that results in exceptional experiences. Thomas does briefly address other cultures and their views, but not any in-depth discourse is addressed. Past examples and references to children’s mention of the divine are planted as seeds which, unfortunately, do not sprout. Children, this reviewer, has spoken with and received emails from, have shared contact with the divine, religious deities and guardian angels, and NDEs have also resulted in contact with higher order spiritual entities. Theorists’ and philosophical views regarding the divine is also lacking coverage in this area, which this reviewer would like to see explored further in Thomas’ future research and explorations with children.
In the final section, Tying the Threads, Thomas drives home the point that children’s experiences are legitimate, especially by the linguistic features (bringing in other witnesses into the narrative and emotional lexis of conveying feelings around the experience) that point toward authenticity rather than artificialism. Thomas feels there is an urgency to exploring unexplained experiences with children. That they are silenced, diagnosed, taken from families, ridiculed by others because of their own living experience. Our current mainstream view of the world is creating suffering for adults and children, animals and our planet, on a grand scale. But children can guide us back to forgotten ways of being and challenge us to start to question everything we thought about the world and universe and ask the big questions, so that stigma would dissolve in a post-materialist world leaving communities of support. She summarizes her book in ten major points, highlighting that current models are inadequate to explained children’s experiences, as they are rooted in the world as being physical, mental vs. material. She underscores that there are no supportive spaces for children’s transformational and unique experiences in western cultures. There is no mentorship. Children’s natural ways of being are not nurtured or encouraged and modern society alienates children from their own source of happiness. Children have wisdom, insight and capacities to inform post-materialist scholarship and should be included in ongoing studies.
Thomas closes with advocating for Kastrup’s (who also wrote the introduction) analytical idealism viewpoint and the great potential for re-authoring children’s unexplained experiences within a simple explanation of the universe as consciousness.
In conclusion, this reviewer would personally have liked to have read more examples and recounting of children’s unexplained experiences. It unfortunately falls short. Further, this reviewer would have liked more discussion on the divine possibilities for unexplained experiences in both children and adults. This reviewer has had children report seeing and hearing religious and spiritual figures and angels as part of their exceptional experiences, whereby they received inner knowing and direction that were precognitive in nature. NDE reports from both children and adults include contact with religious figures and angels who encourage them to return, and impart exceptional abilities. The author does briefly mention other cultures and First Nation views of the spiritual but does not explore this in any depth. It is worth a further look in future explorations with children that the author may embark on and hopefully will be reported.
All in all, this is a most profound and thought-provoking book, well worth the read.
References
Drewes, A. A. (2002). Dr. Louisa Rhine’s Letters Revisited: The Children. Journal of Parapsychology, 66(4), 343-370.
Drewes, A. A. & Drucker, S.A. (1991). Parapsychological Research with Children. Scarecrow Press.
Rao, K. R. (1986). Louise E. Rhine on psi and its place. In K.R. Rao (Ed.), Case studies in parapsychology in honor of Dr. Louisa E. Rhine (pp. 52-62). McFarland.
Rhine, L. E. (1961). Hidden channels of the mind. William Morrow.
Rhine, L. E. (1968). Note on an informal group test of ESP. Journal of Parapsychology, 32(1), 47-53.
Thomas, D. (2022). Playing in the Field: Exploring the nature and emergence of extra sensory experiences with children. Journal of Parapsychology, 86, 322-343.
Dr. Athena A. Drewes is a Licensed Child Psychologist and Clinical Parapsychologist. She can be reached at: [email protected]