William Blake, my favorite hero, was paddled by his father and mother for seeing angels through the window.  He would see angels peering in through the window and caught heck for it but he refused to stop seeing angels.  So they remained there in the background all his life.  One of my daughters, who spent a good bit of her time by herself, but she had an imaginary playmate that was so real to her and it also was a double, she named it after herself and called it “My Suzy”.  And any time anything bad would happen “My Suzy” did it. 

The child is pointing to a very real event in the child’s life and will be transient, it’s just passing.  He’s not going to waste time on something that receives no feedback from the parent at all because he would then be alienating himself, cutting himself off from communication with the parent and that’s a frightful state for the child.  As to what they’re seeing there are an unlimited, infinite number of possibilities for the brain to see.  The estimates that came out a few years ago stated that the brain is registering only about five percent of the total frequency realm available to us for the visual perception.  Why do we limit it?  There’s no moral failure or anything else in it.  It’s simply the fact that the brain, one of the chief actors of the brain is as a filter.  It’s got to filter out of an infinite possibility that finite structure that we can live with.  We can’t live in an infinite continuum.  That’s what we’re really afraid of when we say the collapse and the chaos.  There would be no structure anywhere.  So they’re pointing to what could be in another society, in a different social setting, a very real thing.  All we have to do is look at the Signoi people, studied by a very brilliant Dutch Psychologist, Robert Wolfe, and he found that they were perceiving a world that he did not know.  And finally after years of interaction with them silently they finally brought about a shift in him and he saw and it was the most incredible thing of his life and he said in his old age “We have no idea what we have lost.”  But it was a selective process over which we had no, and there’s no moral failure.  When we look at the reality structures of the Australian Aborigine and we have seriously misunderstood the Aborigine and what he meant by dream time and the fact that we were the unreal people because we could not participate in dream time and they looked on us as ghosts.  And so they’re perceiving things that are simply not in our conceptual perceptual system.

William Blake, my favorite hero, was paddled by his father and mother for seeing angels through the window.  He would see angels peering in through the window and caught heck for it but he refused to stop seeing angels.  So they remained there in the background all his life.  One of my daughters, who spent a good bit of her time by herself, but she had an imaginary playmate that was so real to her and it also was a double, she named it after herself and called it “My Suzy”.  And any time anything bad would happen “My Suzy” did it.  So it functioned in the same way that the book about the German doctors, about them creating a double life and so on.  But these were extremely real to her and we had to set a place at the table for “My Suzy”, as well as Suzy, and that went on for two or three years.  And finally she began to refer to “My Suzy” less and less and we could only assume.  Now let’s take this one more step and that was a study done at Framingham Massachusetts Hospital, the famous Framingham Studies in which they started looking at the capacity to image, the capacity of imagination itself, what is imagination, and they found that there was a certain category of women, they were only looking at women, most of whom had advanced degrees, many of whom held high executive positions and so on, very intelligent women, but they all lived a secret fantasy life.  On probing they would finally break down and tell you their fantasy life that they lived in all the time.  Their common comments about it was that the ordinary world that they had to tend to in their daily work and this that and the other was to them drudgery but it freed them to turn within and live in this great fantasy world.  Many of them spoke of their fantasy love lives.  One woman had said that her lover in her inner imaginary, that they made such incredible love that she would have such intense organisms she had to figure out a way to cover them up because the people around her would notice that something was going wrong with her.  Then we trace all that back to the work of the great Stanford Psychologist in learning and so on.  He did all the work in hypnosis also.  Now his name escapes me.  But he had talked about how between about age 7 and 14 we move into a period of intense suggestibility and intense imagination wherein a suggestion was more powerful than an outright spelling because then the brain would move into this great imaginative world.  His claim was that about 20% of the population don’t lose that at the great transition point between 12 and 15, when we’re moving out of that whole incredible creative fantasy world.  About 20% of the population don’t lose it and remain in this quasi fantasy and quasi world split between the two ff them.  And of course they’re the ones who would be drawn to a lot of the things going on today that other people would ignore like the Monroe Institute going out of the body and so forth, because they already had that enormous capacity for imagining inner worlds and moving into them.