Do Little People Exist?

Back when LSD was a popular recreational drug some of my friends talked about strange experiences in the woods where they witnessed little people dancing and running among the trees.

Because we were all told LSD was a hallucinogen, that is, it made people imagine things that were not real, I dismissed the stories as just that. I thought perhaps my friends were hallucinating while under the influence.

Yet the people who told me these stories spoke of their visions as if they were quite real. For them, it was as if the drug unlocked a veil and allowed them to see things that could not be viewed under normal circumstances. That theory has been enhanced among people in esoteric circles, many of whom regard LSD and the magical cactus as sacred mind enhancing medicines that allow the user to temporarily peer through a veil that obscures the real universe from the eyes and minds of the brain-dead masses. 

After living for a while with the Native Americans of the Southwest, I have had a tendency to believe there may be something true about this story. Our Navajo hosts were involved in a strange peyote cult that also witnessed oddities, including visions of things never seen outside their closed circles. No doubt they also witnessed the little people while dancing under the influence of the cactus flower.

They are called Geow-lud-mo-sis-eg, or "magical little people," among the American natives. On the Hawaiian Islands, the natives talk about the Menehune, or "small sacred workers." And of course the Irish legends speak of the Leprechauns, the English have stories about the Brownies, the Scandinavians speak of trolls and the Germans told of Kobolds and Gnomes. Interesting that the Indigenous people throughout the world share legends about little elves, fairies and dwarves that live in the forest and generally avoid contact with humans.

I also find it strange that the books by J. R. Tolkien about Hobbits, gnomes and other tiny people of the underworld should gain such popularity and now be projected in popular Hollywood films.

Is there a subconscious knowledge shared by all of us in these stories?

There are other groups of people among us who also see the little people, although they rarely will talk about it.

It is said that the people living in isolated areas of the Ozarks and hills of Kentucky and Tennessee also have their stories.

And then there are the elderly suffering from failing eyesight; most often called macular degeneration. Many of these patients, when questioned, report seeing little people around them.

Doctors have a name for this phenomenon among the elderly; Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Naturally, they would have to create a disease or a medical explaination out of such sightings since "normal people" cannot see the same things.

They liken this syndrome to hallucinatory visions.

But ask any of the old people who have seen the little men with their strange stovepipe hats and little shoes dancing across their parlors and they will insist the little people really exist.

And perhaps they do.

Just because the minds of most of us are blocked so that we cannot see beyond the tunnel reality we were taught to believe is out there, doesn't mean that there isnt something more that remains unseen.

If we can believe that aliens are looking down at us from those UFOs, and that they are involved in cattle mutilations for some unexplained reason, why can't we also accept the possibility that gnomes, hobbits, leprechauns, brownies and all of the rest of these tiny people live in the forest behind our houses?

We just haven't taken the time to look.