This episode includes excerpts from The B.O.D.A.V.’s (The Books of Dreams and Visions). It’s a personal collection of fairy encounters and vivid dreams, experienced by a young man from the age of 11 to his late teens, provoked by night time forest walks with his father.
Having had some awareness and interest in the Otherworlds himself, his father had encouraged him to journal these experiences. Some of these drawings are pictured below.
It’s rare that a child or young person is encouraged to explore these realities with such depth by a parent and for that reason, I feel the collection is rare and of great importance to helping us understand our nature of being as humans. I believe that these states of deeper perception with nature are innate within us and socialised out of us from a young age.
Our guest, now in his mid-twenties and undertaking a Master’s in biological science, was able to spend lockdown reunited with his father. This provided an opportunity to re-read the journals and attempt to categorise some of the beings and events that took place.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this beautiful share.
Warning: These are not fairytales and the content is unsuitable for children. Some episodes may contain details which some may find unsettling or frightening. The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast is designed for listeners 16 years and older.
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Recommended further reading:
Martin Brofman’s Anything Can Be Healed is an excellent book for describing how to shift into other realities and see the world from alternative perspectives, notably healing the body, mind and anything that is not working for you, in your life. (Note: I trained with Martin from 2005 until 2014 and his healing system completely changed my life…I will get round to talking about this someday. Let me know if you’d like to hear about it!)
Mike Clelland’s The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee. I would recommend this to anyone interested in reading about people’s extraordinary experiences and how dreams often tie into encounters. I’m reading this at the moment and I find it fascinating. (Note: yes it does involve UFO encounters rather than fairies but there are many similarities and if you haven’t already explored these ideas, then this is an excellent start).
Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality argues that the human psyche extends beyond the confines of the physical human body, and that it may in fact be a part of our reality. It’s a core text for understanding these encounters.
Dr Jack Hunter’s Greening The Paranormal is a collection of essays on humankind’s relationship with earth and what we have come to term as ‘extraordinary experience’.
Neil Rushton’s blog, ‘Dead But Dreaming‘ has a world of information about fairies, experiences and folklore. This particular article, Visioning the Fairies: Magical Ointments and Seeing the Unseen provides some excellent references to folklore in this regard, as touched upon in the podcast.
I totally love this episode and have heard it several times now with Tristan. There is something fresh about hearing it each time, especially when you know the story behind it.
Thank you so much Robert and I know that as people’s understanding of this phenomena expands, many others will appreciate Tristan’s story too. Thank you for sharing and commenting
You’re welcome. Tristan and I have just heard episode 81, very interesting episode about the importance of nature and the fey and how people who have had contact with the faeries or even just believe in them because they are ‘sensitive’ to their energy, should be treated with respect. I know from my own experience that trying to share these things with others has led me into hot water. Sadly, Tristan who received a very important gift of the sight as a young boy, has experienced the same. He is for this reason very reluctant to talk about the BODAVs with anyone unless he knows that they are 100% sympathetic or empathetic towards his childhood world. I was therefore very happy when you chose to interview him on your podcast and put a small part of his story on scarlettofthefae. During that short period of his life, from around 11 to 18 or 19, when the windows of the faery world were open to him, he had literally hundreds of direct encounters with the fae, either in the forest or in his room, or sometimes in his dreams when he slept. I am totally convinced that through the material contained in these dreams and visions, the faeries had some sort of message for him, as they appear to have had for several others who have been guests on your podcasts. The interviews I find most interesting for this reason are those where the faeries are not just contacting people to tease or put the wind up people, but who leave them a lasting impression about the importance of the fey in our lives and their vital role in teaching us to respect and preserve the natural world: the world of the trees, the forests, the rivers, the meadows, and so on. It is this theme which runs throughout the BODAVs as well. And I thank you for interviewing the different people who have made contact with the fey on one level or another and who have received this important message from them. Bye for now and keep up the good work on behalf of the little people.
Really interesting.
I love this stuff; the experiences people have. I’m personally inclined toward the esoteric, extranatural and supernatural. So of course I find it fascinating. Others are very sceptical, but I think those people are missing out, and not just for the obvious reasons.
Here is another good reason not to dismiss such experiences; they are extremely valuable for experiental reasons, perhaps one could say psychological too, but that isn’t a field I’m qualified in. I can however paraphrase a prominent psychologist regarding unusual phenomena:
“Whether it is what they think it is, that is almost completely irrelevant; they have certainly experienced something, as opposed to nothing, or a made-up thing; and that something should be explored and understood, instead of dismissed, buried or ridiculed.”
So dismissive sceptics could perhaps take a leaf from this quote.
For me, this was wonderful to listen to. I very much enjoyed it and would love to see a global resurgence in such interests.
Yes, I entirely agree. Thank you very much Jim 🙂
Thanks a lot for your comment Jim. As the father of the boy involved who saw this phenomenon, I can honestly say without any fear of contradiction that his experiences were authentic and that he had them over a period of many years, since early childhood up until he was around 17 or 18. During that time, we had many adventures together fairy spotting in the forest and he saw a wide plethora of beings, elves, gnomes, dwarfs, dryads, goblins and of course your traditional cute winged fairy. Many of these beings were cute, kindly or even amusing. Others were a little on the nasty, terrifying or weird side. All of these encounters were recorded at the time of them happening in five journals or notebooks which we called the B.O.D.A.V.s. In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, my son and I decided to type out these notebooks and scan the pictures he made when he was a young boy or teen. After all five notebooks were typed I put them on our Facebook page ‘Seeing Fairies. the story of the BODAVS, ‘as a permanent record for anyone who was interested in the history of the fairy life in the area we live in and in the phenomenon of contact with otherworldly beings in general. I have no doubt that what my son saw during that period was genuine – however we both acknowledge that the contacts can be analyzed and read not just from a literal reading, but also a psychological and archetypal one. My son is entirely ‘normal’ or neurotypical in almost every way. He has a masters in biology and teaches at a Jesuit high school in biology, chemistry and physics. He was also a thoroughly normal boy and young man as well, so all of this tends to confirm that the fairy contacts were ‘real,’ in one way or another. In any case, thank you very much for your comment and your interest in this subject and if you have any further questions about these journals, I would be happy to answer them.