Make Money Online: Do Kids See What We Wish We Could See?

A few weeks back, my four year old daughter Salem was still awake and chattering away in her bedroom, despite being in bed for over an hour.

When I went in to give her a cuddle and ask why she was still awake, she whispered to me, “She’s here.”

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“The girl.”

I pulled away a little and looked at Salem, who was looking intently behind my shoulder. “What girl?”

“The girl in the corner.”

I looked behind me to the corner of Salem’s room, where there was a little bit of shadow, but couldn’t see anything. I looked back at Salem, who smiled at me and said, “She’s gone now.”

To say I was a little freaked out is understating it. It probably didn’t help that I had recently watched The Conjuring, where a family has a not-so-pleasant experience with spirits in their new home.

It’s not the first time that Salem has had “conversations” in her room that we can hear through the monitor. Usually we just put it down to her telling herself stories to fall asleep, but after that recent “the girl” exchange, I’m not so sure.

Seems I’m not alone, either…

The Vision Only Kids Have?

When I shared this story on Facebook, many of my friends left examples of their own kids.

CREEPY! But probably true. Lauren used to wave and laugh at someone in the corner of her room when she was a baby. She also knew my dead father’s name when she was only 2 years old…also super creepy!

I used to volunteer at a daycare. One of the girls named her boy doll “Mushu” – which is kind of an odd, Asian name, right? So her mom asked her why she named him so, and the girl said “He told me.”

My son also had “a friend” growing up. He talked about him often and one night while checking on him before bed I saw him in the corner of the room watching over him. We even had to have a chair at the dinner table for him.

The overarching connection between each example is that they all refer to children, and not adults.

In addition to those, another friend suggested the reason for this.

Some children are more sensitive than others. Spirits know when people can see them and are drawn to those people.

Which made me wonder if the innocence of young children allow spirits to be seen as physical beings, and we lose that as we grow into adults and see life in a different way?

The Time I Saw a UFO

I think I believe in ghosts, or whatever spirits are, or the friends that my daughter and the kids in the examples above talk to. I’m not 100% sure, but there’s too much to discard completely.

Do all kids simply have imaginary conversations, or are there spirits of kids that died early that roam the earth looking for friends to keep them company?

Do all kids find a storytelling gift early, and it’s only when they go to school and are taught that it’s “bad” to use your imagination that they lose the will to converse with someone that isn’t there?

Are our beliefs and imagination shaped by adults that don’t remember their own childhood?Click To Tweet

The reason I’m not sold on the belief that ghosts don’t exist is that many people claim that there’s no such thing as UFO’s – and yet I clearly saw one when I was a teenager in Scotland.

My sister and I were coming home from a movie, and something caught my eye. I looked up, and there was a light traveling at crazy speed, in three different directions in about the same amount of seconds.

The light stopped, hovered, rose, and then dropped. Then it scuttled one way, then another. It took one final swoop, for about five seconds, then shot up into the air beyond the clouds.

I looked at my sister, who was nine at the time, and she said that was the coolest thing she’s ever seen. To this day, I believe we both saw a UFO.

So if I saw something that so many adults say doesn’t exist, doesn’t it stand to reason our kids see things we say don’t exist?

The Things We Wish We Saw

I don’t know.

I do know that I’m extremely jealous of my little girl, if she has a ghost for a friend. How cool would that be? As long as it’s like Casper and not Chucky…

While I don’t recall our son Ewan having the same experience, my wife recalls him also having conversations, but the cats we used to have kept the ghosts at bay (seemingly cats are very good at this kind of thing, as shared by others on that same Facebook thread).

As an adult, it’d be nice to have something whimsical, or imaginary, but that’s also real to believe in.

The world is a cruel, cold place at times. It’d be nice to be able to see old friends no longer here, or loved ones long since passed.

But perhaps the realities of the world have made it too late for us to go back to that.

It reminds me of the scene in the Christmas movie, The Polar Express. The main character, a little boy who refound his belief in Santa Claus after an adventure to the North Pole, is given one of the bells from Santa’s sleigh.

On Christmas Day, only the boy and his little sister can hear the chime when they shake the bell. His parents can’t. As the voiceover of the boy-now-an-adult shares, even his sister lost the ability to hear the bell as she got older.

Not him, though – because he’d seen with his own eyes, and he believed.

Perhaps we’ve lost the ability to see beyond our eyes, and believe that which we no longer do. If so, that’s a shame.

Then again, we could always let our kids show us the way again…

original: Pure Blogging