The Impossibility.

The children were the first. Often on farms or in gardens playing with animals they would glimpse them as if in a daydream. Or at least they were dismissed as such. But such was the frequency of this same ‘daydream’ by so many children many miles from each other it became newsworthy. What was this phenomenon, children seeing people, a little strange but recognisably people, doing ordinary things often around animals. It was investigated. In brief, a researcher aware of the daydream element and practiced in Ericsonian hypnosis induced a trance state in one of the children in his practice room but the child did not see any people. He persisted and did the same where the child had been seeing them. This time the people were there and not just glimpses but for the whole period of the trance state. The child would smile and talk to them as if they were real though the researcher saw nothing. Intrigued he asked a colleague to put himself in a trance in that same place. He too saw the people moving amongst the conscious people and going about their business as if they weren’t there. He found he could ask them questions that they were more than willing to answer. There was a whole population of them mostly in unpopulated areas because there were less ordinary people to avoid. They saw these ordinary people as blind, uncommunicative and somehow absorbed in their own conscious thoughts. Of course he found it incredible that there was a host of other people in a sense existing exclusively in this unconscious realm. How could it be there were two types of humans sharing this planet, one not aware of the other and the other unable to communicate? But, they would say, you are communicating with us in your trance state, and we with you, and he would miss them when he was brought back from the trance. There was something about their simple honesty, their lack of need, their playfulness that attracted him. In fact in a trance when he looked back at his own ‘ordinary people’ he too saw them as uncommunicative, almost robotic. Were these the elves of folk lore? His experiment was repeated by others and they too became entranced by that same simple beautiful honesty. As time passed much was made of the disappearances. The experiments were stopped. They were considered dangerous. Virtually all the people that underwent the experiment disappeared, just up and vanished, at least to ordinary people.