MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

Children today live lives that are surrounded by school work, bullying, Legos, movies, YouTube, video games, Peppa Pig and Spongebob.

However, more and more parents of very young girls and boys are also worried about another thing their child’s life revolves around and that is death and various influences which are terrifying and somewhat mesmerizing.

Child psychologists say that questions about death and loss are normal for kids; death obsession, loss, and harm are becoming part of a child’s life, so much so that the thought of other’s deaths does not have the same impact on children of today.

There are things that once scared us as kids that have little or no impact on them.

Children born in the 1960’s were watching horror movies in the 1970’s that were made in the 1930’s through the 1950’s. They weren’t as scary as they were campy. In the 1960’s and 1970’s many movies dealing with encounters with demons and the devil. In the late 1970’s and 1980’s, we were subjected to teen slasher films with iconic killers like Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers from Halloween or Freddy Kruger from the film, Nightmare on Elm Street.

The films would become more violent and then the slasher and torture films started to fade out and cerebral films where the terror was psychological began to emerge. Many of the films dealt with real fears that children would have about being children.

Films like “IT” by Stephen King started the genre of frightened kids having to face the fear of a killer clown in their hometown.

There was the childhood fear in a young boy in The Shining — the little boy, Danny, rides his tricycle through the long halls seeing to creepy twin girls and saying the word REDRUM.

There was one other film called, The Sixth Sense, where a young boy had a very terrifying secret — he was able to see dead people walking around his neighborhood.

He would say to his mother “I see dead people” and you can imagine how you would feel if that was your child.

How would you deal with a child that would say something that would strike you as odd or synchronous?

I get e-mails from time-to-time from listeners whose children tell them things that they just can’t figure out. They sometimes speak of past lives, or listeners have told me that their children have spoken to them in adult voices—some voices are distorted and sound demonic.

I actually have related a story about Liam my stepson. One day we were walking in a park near a huge pond. Liam, who was four years old at the time, said to me, “This looks like the place where I died.” I looked at him and I said “died? Do you know what death is?” He said to me,”yes it means no more tomorrows.”

He told me that he was swimming and he drowned in a pond like this one. I was shocked. Now at 12, Liam is now an excellent swimmer and competes athletically – he now wants to learn how to scuba dive.

Many children remember their past lives spontaneously, without hypnosis or prompting. Some as young as two and still in diapers blurt out, “I remember when I died before” or “My other mommy had curly hair”. They often describe details that they had no way of learning in this life. Some remember startling personal details of relatives who died before they were born.

There are also reactions that kids are having as the deal with the world around them. Parents are now wondering how to react to how jaded or even how cruel children become when they have to deal with real-world problems.

A mother once wrote a columnist for advice because she was witnessing a strange reaction from her boys about the coverage of war on television. One said very little as if he was mesmerized by the image while the other son asked “Why don’t we all just kill them all…it’s no big deal.”

A recent story in the news has created both anger and sadness as a 9-year-old Colorado boy told his mother he was gay and that he was excited to tell his fellow classmates. Jamel Myles told his classmates he was gay on the first day of school. He was bullied and was later found dead in his home, he apparently committed suicide.

The mother, of course, feels that the bullying is to be blamed for her son’s death; however, I wonder how this could have been prevented if the mother was to analyze the weird things kids say and give advice to her son on how some people may not understand how a 9-year-old would even know or believe such a thing.

According to his mother, Jamel was terrified to tell her because he worried that his mom would disown him.

I wondered if the young boy was influenced by his environment, or if he was gay in a past life. I wondered about how a 9-year-old would be sure of anything that deals with sexual preference — I could be wrong, but I was ambivalent about anything sexual at 9 years old.

A recent article published in the Daily Mail discussed the parental accounts of children saying strange or creepy things that may indicate either a past life or some sort of psychic ability.

Parents were sharing the spookiest things children have said to them, including seeing ghosts, remembering past lives and predicting pregnancies and deaths in their families.

Back when I was 6 years old, my 5 year old brother Kenneth nearly drowned in a canal near our home. The neighbors found him pale lying on the banks of the canal. He was all wet and trembling and they threw a towel around him.

My brother never mentioned or didn’t recall what happened to him unto one day when he was 10 he was going through my mother’s hope chest. He found a picture of my mother’s father. He was excited because it triggered the memory of his ordeal at the canal. He stated that this was the man that saved him from drowning.

As kids we never knew our maternal grandfather – he committed suicide before we were born. My brother was certain that the man in the picture was the man who saved him from drowning.

An internet blogging forum for parents called “Mumsnet” recently featured parents who were concerned about incidents where children were saying things to them they thought were creepy and troubling.

One of the first instances reported was that of a young single mother whose daughter kept going into a closet and shutting the door. Her daughter was nearly three years old. She couldn’t understand what the fascination with the closet was.

According to the mother she inquired of the little girl as to why she wanted to go into the closet. Her daughter looked at her and said “I am talking to the scary man in the closet, but he says tonight he won’t be in the closet—he will be in bed with you.”

She states in the blog there was no man in the closet, nor was there any man who was hiding in the home – she did however have the basement and several rooms checked by the police just to be safe.

Another parent shared another incident, telling how their daughter appeared to predict the 9/11 attacks in New York.

She wrote: ‘One day when my second daughter was four she seemed to be concentrating very hard and showed me a picture of two long thin rectangles with black curls coming out of it. I asked her what it was and she said it was a plane crash.

She later switched on the television to see the world trade center towers on fire on September 11th.

And one mother described how she took her eight-year-old son to her mother-in-law’s house when he described seeing a man walking up the stairs.

She added: ‘He described my husband’s father who had died very suddenly in the house just before we met.’

Meanwhile, many parents shared the memories of past lives their children appeared to be harboring.

One woman told how her son insisted they used to live in a house which burned down, writing: ‘Up until he was mid-teens he used to refer to the ‘house we lived in that burned down, “you remember Mom he would say- with the fire engines and ambulances and police.”

Never happened but he insists still that he remembers it.

Another story that I read was the account of a 4-year-old girl hugging her grandfather really tight. She said, “goodnight granddad I will never forget you.” That night the mother received a phone call that he had died in his sleep.

Lurking in the margins of our lives are experiences that cannot be explained. It can be theorized that these experiences remain in the margins in most part because they shock us, confound us, and play with the mind in such a way that it makes us question mortality and why we were given the experience in the first place.

When paranormal experiences happen and we are witness to them, it can be argued that it expands our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.

These experiences are unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we know that we are awake, but the experience can be compared to a dream or a nightmare.

For me, they are genuine wake-up calls to the fact that there is more to learn about the quantum entanglements that exist in the matrix we have constructed and that there sometimes isn’t an explanation for everything.

Many people who have had these experiences in their lives have told me that the paranormal event they were involved in has changed them to the very core.

After all, when you see or experience the unknown you can say that you no longer live in a disenchanted universe.

Young children also have experiences that open the mind to possibilities that everything can’t always be explained.

Almost every child has, at one time in his or her life, made the acquaintance of an imaginary friend, an entity that can help develop the child’s imagination and can also be a solace during times of great stress or loneliness.

The child will act as if the imaginary being is physically present by talking to it, playing with it, or even attempting to feed it. Of course, to another person, it will seem as though the child is talking into thin air. If told that there is nothing there, the child will often retaliate in a defensive manner by stating that the so-called imaginary friend is invisible.

While we assume that the child’s invisible friend is unreal or a figment of his imagination What if the child’s imaginary playmate is actually a real individual or creature?

Children are much more open to psychic events that are adults. Those of us who have reached the age of adulthood have developed certain mental filters that keep us from being considered out of step with society.

These filters help us view the world in the accepted fashion. These filters may, in fact, keep us from seeing the world as it really is. However, a child has to yet develop the type of worldview that filters out the impossible.

A poem that is over a hundred years old describes the frustration of an imaginary friend that won’t go away and upon realizing that it is not a figment of imagination becomes a nascence and needs to be eliminated.

The poem is called, Antigonish or “I met a man that wasn’t there.”

“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…”

It is a common belief that most traditional poems, nursery rhymes and children’s songs and stories were designed to inform kids via metaphor about a potentially harsh world in a time where children worked and traveled and were essentially treated more like miniature adults than “kids”. But originally, fairy tales were told to many different audiences, ghost stories and tales of witches, child catchers and conjured entities were also told by frightened villagers.

The legends were based on a belief in paranormal machinations; poorer people were always encountering demons, specters, goblins, and shadowy figures.

I remember investigating a case where a young Latino boy was on video chasing after something that appeared in the corner of the room. His mother first thought it was an imaginary friend. The young boy knew what it was he called it, “el Duende.” It is the little creature that hides in the walls. When I observed the video I thought it was a rat, but after analyzing the recording many times, the thing looked like a little man.

Imaginary friends often speak to little kids – psychologists sometimes say that it is the child projecting; however, sometimes it is a bit more supernatural.

Again, we remember Danny in the film “The Shining.” His imaginary friend lived in his finger and warned him that there were dangers lurking in the cozy setting of the old hotel.

Parents that document the strange stories about their children have also stated that there have been accounts of children meeting their dead grandparents, or other strangers that have either tried to help or have threatened a family member.

A woman described how her boyfriend’s young cousin was haunted by ‘scratching sounds’ at night. The little boy would say that this imaginary friend lived in the walls.

The terrible truth was that it was not an imaginary friend.

It turned out that the scratching sounds in the walls were actually an elderly woman who lived next door. The scratching sounds were so loud that it kept the little boy up at night. Worried that his mother would blame him for the sounds he would say that his imaginary friend was doing the scratching.

A few years later the police had contacted the family and asked them if they ever had any problems with their elderly neighbor.

Basically, she was found dead in the house and as the family was clearing the place of her personal effects they found a diary where it was discovered that she had a mental breakdown.

For years the old lady would write in her diary that the little boy next door was possessed by Satan and convinced herself she had to kill him to save the neighborhood.

The scratching noises had been her trying to claw through the wall to get to him at night.

The woman had apparently thought that the little boy was a brat and was always leering at him through a window as he would play in the yard.

In another account, a woman writes that she picked up her 5-year-old from the park. He let her know that “daddy was playing a trick on him.” Basically, before he went out to play he saw his daddy peeking out from the walls.

The mother was concerned because her husband was at work, so the boy said that whoever it was it was “daddy-sized” coming out of the wall and standing in the hallway staring at him.

Sometimes imaginary friends are not so imaginary and sometimes children have the clarity of psychics.

Some of us had imaginary friends when we were kids and even monsters under our beds. It was a world that by adult standards seemed impossible and intrinsically disturbing.

However, adults have bigger demons to chase, ghosts to fend off. And demons to keep at bay.

Adults do hang on to those realistic memories of entities visiting from other realms of existence, including those where dreams become windows on the world of the abyss.

There is a proverb that has been paraphrased from the bible “Out of the mouths of babes comes truth or wisdom.”

Perhaps we should listen to our children — they know that someone or something is coming.

They know that it is real and can manifest in times of trauma and turmoil.

https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/the-sick-sense-out-of-the-mouth-of-babes-w-rosemary-ellen-guiley-august-29-2018

Written by Ron Patton