Encountering the Faeries in the 21st Century

Recently, I was sent an email from a woman wanting to share her experience of encountering what appeared to be faeries or nature spirits. As with many people who interact with faerie-type entities for the first time, she wanted to make clear that she was not intoxicated, had not taken any drugs and has no history of mental illness. In our rationalistic culture, this is understandable; any contact with something that may be termed supernatural is often met with suspicion, derision or concern as to the person’s mental state. Western culture is predominantly reductionist – anything that appears to contravene the accepted consensus reality based on material physical laws is usually deemed as a misrepresentation of a natural phenomenon, a hallucination, a dream, or chicanery. This is a narrow vision of reality. There are mountains of data describing supernatural, parapsychological and anomalous phenomena from around the world, but most of it is anecdotal. The data cannot usually be scrutinised by scientific protocols because most of it happens spontaneously; it is not possible to recreate the circumstances in a laboratory. Does this make the anecdotes less real? Does it disqualify them from our attention? It shouldn’t. Our entire lives are made up of a series of anecdotal incidents, stored in memory and recalled when necessary to inform the present. If an anecdotal account of an experience that seems supernatural is recounted with honesty and clarity, we should perhaps attempt to escape any reality boxes we find ourselves in and assess it on its merits, even if it contradicts an ingrained worldview. The following anecdotal testimony describes an encounter with faerie-like entities, which may be compared to the hundreds of reports made to The Fairy Investigation Society’s recent census, suggesting that whatever the faeries are, people are still experiencing contact with them in the 21st century. There is a palpable, authentic interface with a metaphysical reality, which doesn’t sit well with mainstream culture but is nonetheless continuing to happen.

The woman was 39 years old when the experience happened in July 2018. She has insisted on anonymity but given permission to publish her testimony on deadbutdreaming along with any interpretative assessment. The main body of her text is reproduced here in full, with minor spelling, grammatical and formatting corrections. She has seen the article in its first draft, corrected some points of fact and agreed for me to post it.

A 21st-Century Faerie Experience

“I live in London with my husband and two daughters aged 4 and 6. My husband and I are both professional people living what I guess you would call a middle-class life. We are happy and enjoy the culture available in London. But sometimes I find the city a bit pressured and claustrophobic. But I am lucky enough to have an aunt who lives in a cottage in Somerset, who I have visited twice a year since my eldest was born. The cottage has a very large garden (over half an acre?), which is the pride and joy of my aunt. She has help to look after it, but she does a lot herself and it is a beautiful mixture of lawn, borders, summer house, wild areas and a small orchard of a dozen apple trees and half a dozen plum trees. It is such a contrast to my London life and the girls have come to love being there.

The event I want to tell you about happened in July 2018. My husband was away at a conference and so I took the week off and took the girls to my aunt’s place. On the second night, once I’d put them to bed, I went out to sit on a lounger next to the apple trees. The sun had just set after a very warm day and I was feeling very relaxed, content to just gaze out beyond the trees to the soft light on the hill beyond the garden. I’d just been through a very stressful couple of months at work and this felt like heaven.

After about fifteen minutes I noticed what I thought were a couple of squirrels racing up the trunk of one of the trees. They were moving a bit oddly and so I pulled myself up from the recliner to focus in on them more clearly. When they moved into sight from behind the trunk I was suddenly jolted. My heart was in my mouth. The two squirrels were actually two small humans! They moved strangely, with jerky movements but I was convinced they had human form, although I could not tell the gender. They could have been no taller than two feet and seemed dressed in dull brown clothing that sometimes melded into the tree bark. I was about twenty feet away and although the dusk was coming they were very clear to me. They seemed to be ‘mucking about’ on one of the boughs, as if playing a game. But I heard no sounds. My feeling was amazement. I shut and opened my eyes several times and pinched myself. They continued to play their game for about five minutes, during which time I watched intently but did not move a muscle. I could just make out their facial features, and would be willing to testify in a court of law that they were human, albeit distorted and maybe slightly cartoon-like. After approximately five minutes they simply vanished. I mean really vanished. One second they were there, the next they just popped out of sight.

When they had disappeared I became slightly agitated. I watched for a few more minutes and then felt I needed to get back to the cottage. The next day I decided to ask my aunt outright if she had ever seen anything strange in the garden. She’s an old-school country woman and has lived there for over three decades. She told me she was always hearing laughter and tinkling bells when working in the garden but had never seen anything. I told her what had happened and she seemed quite relaxed to hear it. She suggested there might be ‘nature spirits’ in the garden and for some reason they had made an appearance to me.

The next evening at the same time I sat in the lounger again, but there was nothing. I started to doubt my memory even though I knew what I had seen. The following day the girls were playing in the garden under the apple trees while aunt and I took tea. I was convinced we were being watched. It’s hard to describe and I know it sounds like paranoia, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that we were all being observed by something. I said nothing to my aunt about this and obviously nothing to the girls. So once again that evening I sat in the lounger by the apple trees. I was relaxed but thinking about the feeling of earlier that afternoon. Then, again, I saw two squirrels on the same tree. This time they seemed to ‘drift’. I mean they were squirrels but they seemed to levitate from the bough, at which moment they became something else. It’s hard for me to describe. They appeared to form into misty shapes, slightly illuminated, which flew around the branches of the tree. Again, I watched for maybe five minutes and there was a deep feeling of peace as I did so. And the moment before the shapes faded away I heard a distinct voice, as if next to my ear, which said: ‘We tend the trees.’ It was like a whisper, maybe childlike, but ever so real. It made me jump from the lounger. I investigated the tree for about fifteen minutes before returning to the cottage. Again, once they were gone I became agitated.

I discussed this with my aunt the next day and she was very blasé about it, which surprised me. She didn’t seem to see the big deal, but it was definitely a big deal to me. Nothing else like this happened for the rest of the week and we returned to London. I haven’t said a word to my husband about this as he is a very practical, no-nonsense sort of person and I don’t want to rock any boats. In fact, I am a very practical person, non-religious and have never considered the supernatural anything more than delusion. But these experiences seemed very supernatural. I really don’t know what to make of it. All I can say is that I am as convinced as I can be that the incidents happened as I describe. They had a dream-like quality but I WAS NOT asleep. I haven’t drunk alcohol for eight years, have never taken illicit drugs and have no history of mental illness.

Since the experiences, I have researched into ‘nature spirits’ and found out something about fairy folklore, which is something I knew nothing about (although the girls have always loved fairy stories). I found your website and was amazed to read about modern people interacting with ‘faeries’ (why do you spell it like that?). You speak a lot about altered states of consciousness in your writing. Maybe I was in an altered state, but if so it must have been totally natural, because, as I say, I take no intoxicants. The experiences have definitely changed the way I look at the world. I feel that since they happened I have become more open-minded and questioning of the way the world works. It’s been almost a year now but the effect remains. I haven’t visited my aunt since, but the family is due there in July 2019, and so I’ll let you know if I see any more fairies!”

‘Tree Spirits’ by Brian Froud

Assessing the Experience

There is a lot to unpack here. As with any anecdotal testimony, the first question must be to assess the honesty of the account. People make things up and not always for clearly-defined gains or reasons. Without knowing the person giving the testimony it is difficult to ascertain whether they are fabricating the whole or part of the account or if they are exaggerating for effect. This is a perennial issue in folklore collection – the hermeneutical compounds of the testimonies are difficult to unravel. However, in this particular case (augmented by some additional email correspondence) I’m as sure as I can be that the person is telling the truth as far as she remembers it. It seems to be the deposition of someone who is genuinely confused and intrigued about an incident for which they have no explanation within their ordinary and familiar worldview.

But even the most scrupulously honest recall of an event is still subject to the vagaries of memory. The plasticity of memory appertaining to any eye-witness event is a well-studied psychological trait. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted an in-depth study of how people remembered automobile accidents at various times after the event, concluding that: “findings seem to indicate that memory for an event that has been witnessed is highly flexible. If someone is exposed to new information during the interval between witnessing the event and recalling it, this new information may have marked effects on what they recall. The original memory can be modified, changed or supplemented.” This is, of course, unavoidable in any testimony of a past incident. In some ways, a non-ordinary supernatural event may be less prone to plasticity as it is likely to be a special event, detached from the everyday. Its unconventionality may burn it into memory in a more exacting way and its recall be more reliable than for that of a more commonplace occurrence. But potentially numinous incidents, such as encounters with supernatural entities, may also be subject to increased amounts of reconstitution, where the experiencer attempts to make subsequent rationalisations of the event and even suppress aspects of what has happened in order to codify it to accepted social and cultural belief systems. This is (and always has been) an unavoidable component of folklore. It does not, however, discredit the experience. So with these caveats in mind, what might this incident tell us about the faeries and how they may be able to interface with human consciousness?

First, the state of consciousness of the woman had been altered by her transplantation from her usual urban environment to a rural setting. This is not an uncommon occurrence for city-dwellers holidaying in the country, but it evidently had an effect on her state of mind, perhaps heightened by a period of work pressures leading up to the stay with her aunt. Many of the respondents to the Fairy Investigation Society’s census reported their experiences as happening during various types of special circumstances, where they were somewhere away from their usual habitat. The census also contains many descriptions of people being calm, happy, relaxed or meditative just prior to their experiences. These states of mind (along with more negative states such as grief, depression and anxiety) also play a part in many historical folklore accounts of interactions with metaphysical entities, where the protagonist is removed from their normal everyday existence and find themselves in a different mindset. This was the case with my correspondent. She had moved from an intense, stressful lifestyle to one of relaxation and calmness in a short space of time. While there were evidently no intoxicants involved in constructing her experience, the swift change of environments is an important element in terms of how her consciousness may have been altered and perhaps rendered more susceptible to a numinous incident.

Relaxed and calm, enjoying the ambience of a special natural environment she found herself encountering something outside her usual cosmology. The shock of what was happening finds common cause with the respondents to the Fairy Investigation Society’s census, where disbelief is a customary reaction. Such consternation is a natural response to something so out of the ordinary. And the disturbance of normality is likely to cause an adrenalin rush. This can have a variety of effects on how the reality of the moment is perceived, but one is that attention is concentrated so that events can appear so super-real that they become abnormal. However, it is this type of intense concentration that was advocated by Rudolf Steiner when, in the early 20th century, he was suggesting we are able to recognise metaphysical realities sitting alongside our usual material reality only when we are capable of relaxing our usual sense-filters. He suggested that once this filter removal was achieved we would be able to ascertain the Supersensible world, where, he proposed, reside a multifarious realm of nature spirits, sometimes known as faeries. Steiner called this clairvoyance, and this is perhaps what was pervading my correspondent’s consciousness when she experienced supernatural entities in the orchard garden.

The observed entities themselves conform to folkloric and esoteric taxonomies. Most faeries (though by no means all) are described as humanoid. This may be the human observer translating what they are actually seeing into something tangible in order to make sense out of it. Although she did not describe any details of clothing, the description of them ‘melding’ into the tree bark has resonance with many historic and modern faerie encounters, where the entities seem almost a part of the natural environment, but not quite. They also seemed playful: ‘mucking about’ on the tree. This is another common attribute of the faeries – they like games. Are they doing this for the benefit of the human observer, or is this once again a trick of consciousness to make the supernatural more palatable? Childlike behaviour is less threatening than an intense encounter. The suggestion that faeries have in recent decades been updated to a new tech-form in the shape of alien abductors may indicate that our collective consciousness has lost the ability to code metaphysical encounters and that our cultural neurosis has turned them into specific sinister confrontations. However, although my correspondent felt agitated after the experiences, the actual time of the encounter was marked by a feeling of peace and wonder. She was not frightened, only amazed.

‘The Introduction’ by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945)

The second experience seems to have turned the relatively traditional faerie-types into ‘nature spirits’. There is much discussion among folklorists, Fortean investigators and occultists about whether ‘nature spirits’ and faeries are two different forms of metaphysical entities. It is certainly true that most folkloric representations of faeries do not see them as environment propagators. But there is also a long tradition of allowing elementals into the faerie taxonomy. The 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus defined the metaphysical spirits of nature into gnomes (earth), sylphs (air), undines (water) and salamanders (fire), a typology followed by 19th- and 20th-century Theosophists, including Rudolf Steiner. And a large minority of respondents to the Fairy Investigation Society’s census described the entities they encountered as ‘nature spirits’. The difference between folkloric faeries and nature spirits is perhaps only semantic. They all seem to be coming from the same place and interact with human consciousness in the same concerted manner. The fact that my correspondent saw her entities on the same tree might strengthen the idea that they were simply different aspects of a common phenomenon.

‘The Elementals’ by Josephine Wall

The Faerie Phenomenon

What that phenomenon is, however, is a difficult question to answer. Deadbutdreaming has made several attempts to get to the root of faerie phenomenology:

A Faerie Taxonomy

Some Faerie Metaphysics

Frightening and Enlightening: The Phenomenology of Modern Faeries

But they are evasive, like many supernatural or metaphysical phenomena. This particular encounter is perhaps rather typical of modern faerie experiences in that there is an oblique quality to the interaction; the person is confronted by what they deem an irrational occurrence. From a materialistic perspective, it should not have happened. But if that perspective is allowed some leeway, then it is possible to accept that a human consciousness is interacting with a physical environment and what is intrinsic within that consciousness, albeit latent, makes itself visible (and audible) in a coded way within that environment. The concept of a collective consciousness, storing all human experience, allows the explanation of a transceiving brain to plug into mythological and archetypal subject matter when certain conditions are met. Faeries and nature spirits are deeply embedded within the mythological cycle of humanity. Historically, they have manifested in folklore and occult literature, but more recently (as in this incident) they appear anecdotally, often within the lives of people who do not expect their presence. This does not mean they are not real. They are subjectively real within the consciousness of the observer, just as any experience in life, and just because they cannot be captured within experimental conditions does not exclude them from an overall reality. Consciousness itself is not material; it exists as a metaphysical construct and, despite many centuries of scientific endeavour, its true nature remains elusive – it cannot be wedded to matter. It usually operates within the bounds of material physical laws, but when the bonds are loosened and the state of consciousness is altered – through psychotropic drugs, meditation, clairvoyance, emotional disturbance, trauma, or just a peaceful mindset – we appear to sometimes view things that are operating outside of normalised reality. They are non-local, i.e. they come from somewhere else; perhaps a collective consciousness to which we do not normally have access.

So do faerie and supernatural entity encounters have a purpose? If we allow the possibility of their existence at whatever level, are they conveying a message? In this particular testimony, they may have been simply manifesting in order to draw the woman out of her stressful lifestyle; to recalibrate a potentially unhealthy mindset. Her consciousness was perhaps tapping into a deeper, archetypal reality (as it might also do in dreams) to demonstrate to her that there is more to life than she had been believing. Her comment that she had become more “open-minded and questioning of the way the world works” since the encounter suggests the experience has had a fundamental effect on her worldview. This is a common motif among people who interact with faerie entities. Folkloric examples often describe a changed person after the faerie encounter and The Fairy Investigation Society’s census is replete with people who say their experience has changed them, usually for the better. Perhaps the faeries and nature spirit-type entities appear simply to drag us out of the dogmatic materialistic/reductionist cosmology we have become entrenched within. They may be (and have always been) metaphysical messengers, reminding us of William James‘ words: “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness that are entirely different.”

But there can be specific messages as well. “We tend the trees” does appear to be a definitive communication conveying the point about the nature spirits’ purpose in the metaphysical cultivation of the natural world to a person who had no idea this might be a possibility. Despite my correspondent insisting she was not asleep during the encounter, this does sound like the sort of audio-communication that takes place during a hypnogogic episode, when we are on the edge of sleep. This is, of course, another form of altered state of consciousness, when the waking state partly crosses the border into the unconscious realm. Once again, this state of consciousness is no less real than our everyday state and may constitute a special place where we are able to access information that is not usually available.

Whatever the various interpretations of this particular experience, it does seem clear that interactions with supernatural entities, which may be described as faeries, are still taking place in the 21st century. They do not seem to be consigned to folklore and appear to be a genuine phenomenon that pervades our contemporary culture. While there is a tendency in recent literature to relate faerie-type encounters to altered states of consciousness invoked by psychotropic substances, my correspondent’s testimony, as well as the hundreds of experiences recorded in the Fairy Investigation Society’s census, do suggest that anyone can interact with these metaphysical beings if certain circumstances are conducive. It would seem the faeries are with us for the long haul, unwilling to depart from human consciousness and perhaps hanging around to teach us a few more lessons about ourselves.

The cover image is ‘Midsummer Faeries’ by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).