Screen memory?

I enjoyed reading the Fairy Census reports [ FT362:30-37]. The accounts were very interesting, though one in particular stood out and caught my attention. This was case #357 (US, Oregon, 1970s) of the young child being sent to bed as a punishment, and then seeing a caravan of gnome-like creatures walking out of his wardrobe. The child went screaming to his parents, whereupon the father took the child back into the bedroom, only this time he restrained the child by placing duct-tape over his mouth and around his hands and feet, and then left the room leaving the child in the dark. The gnomes returned and this time managed to climb onto the bed; they began playing with the tape and the child’s eyelashes. This story certainly comes across as another account of childhood high strangeness, with the typical bedroom visitor scenario, but the detail that made me think twice was the abusive actions of the father; tying up your child and leaving him in a dark room is not normal behaviour, and this small detail hints at something more going on in that home. It’s not my place to speculate further on the above case in isolation, but any father who could do such a thing would not find it difficult to make the jump to even more serious abuse.

Could the child in question be fabricating a screen memory of sorts? A psychological coping mechanism to deal with, and cover over with fantasy support, certain traumatic events or memories of physical/sexual abuse? (See Craig Steel, ‘Hallucinations as a trauma-based memory: implications for psychological interventions’,

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015; 6: 1262.) On the other hand, perhaps these entities are interested in, and are actually appearing to children (either as energy projection or externalised manifestation) because of their traumatic/abusive experiences, a sort of ultraterrestrial social worker! It’s an interesting idea and one that could well merit further investigation. John Hope Dorset