In "Children's Unexplained Experiences in a Post Materialist World," researcher Donna Maria Thomas takes on something most adults prefer to ignore or explain away: the strange, unsettling, utterly fascinating experiences children report when they tell us they've talked to deceased relatives, sensed things before they happen, or visited places that seem impossibly real. You know, the moments when a child says something that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and you quickly change the subject or assure them it was just their imagination.

Thomas has spent two decades listening to children describe these experiences, and here's what makes her work different: she actually believes them. Not in a credulous, New Age sort of way, but with the careful attention of a researcher who thinks these reports might be telling us something important about consciousness itself. Her approach is participatory rather than extractive. She conducts research with children rather than on them, letting their experiences guide the inquiry. The book weaves together consciousness research, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and emerging post-materialist science to suggest a middle way between the two dominant responses to children's anomalous experiences: medicalizing them as symptoms of disorder or sensationalizing them as evidence of psychic gifts. What if, Thomas asks, these experiences are neither pathological nor supernatural, but rather windows into aspects of consciousness we've largely forgotten how to access? Drawing on her own childhood out-of-body and near-death experiences following two car accidents, she suggests that what children tell us about their inner lives might offer profound insights into the fundamental nature of reality itself.

Most of us have been taught there are basically two ways to think about a child who reports seeing spirits or knowing things they couldn't possibly know. Either something is wrong with the child's brain (cue the psychiatric evaluation and medication), or the child has special powers (cue the sensationalized media appearances). Thomas argues that both frameworks miss the point entirely. The medical model treats these experiences as symptoms to be eliminated, often leading to pharmaceutical interventions that teach children their own perceptions can't be trusted. The "psychic kids" narrative, meanwhile, turns children into curiosities or commodities.

What if we could step outside this binary? Thomas proposes that children's unexplained experiences (whether telepathic hunches, encounters with the dead, or perceptions of alternate realities) represent something more ordinary and more profound than either framework suggests. They're natural variations in human consciousness, expanded forms of cognition that don't fit neatly into our materialist worldview but aren't supernatural either. This reframing matters immensely for parents, teachers, and therapists who encounter children reporting such experiences. Instead of rushing to diagnose or sensationalize, we might learn to create space where children feel safe exploring these aspects of their inner lives without shame. Sometimes the most radical act is simply taking a child seriously when they tell you about something you can't explain.

Here's something worth sitting with: the way we interpret children's unusual experiences has almost everything to do with the cultural water we swim in. Thomas contrasts Western materialist culture, which systematically dismisses anything that can't be measured or reproduced in a lab, with indigenous and First Nations cultures that maintain living traditions for understanding and working with non-ordinary experiences. In many non-Western traditions, a child who reports encounters with spirits or alternate realities isn't seen as disordered. They might be regarded as gifted, someone who needs guidance and mentoring to develop their capacities wisely.

Our modern Western systems (education, healthcare, psychiatry) are soaked through with materialist assumptions about what's real and what isn't. When children's subjective experiences don't conform to these assumptions, the system doesn't question its framework. It questions the child. This cultural invalidation can wound deeply, teaching kids that their authentic perceptions are fundamentally untrustworthy, that they need to edit their inner lives to fit what adults find acceptable. Thomas makes a convincing case that the West has much to learn from cultures that never lost their frameworks for expanded consciousness. Recovering this wisdom isn't just about being more open-minded. It's essential for supporting healthy development in children and for advancing our collective understanding of what consciousness actually is.

Watch a child lost in play and you're watching someone slip into an altered state of consciousness. Thomas points out something that's both obvious and easily overlooked: children regularly and naturally access non-ordinary consciousness through everyday activities. During absorbed play, they enter something like a meditative trance. Time becomes elastic, space transforms, the ordinary rules don't quite apply. They report experiencing time as nonlinear, their perception less constrained by the categories and concepts that structure adult awareness.

These natural shifts in consciousness might be precisely what creates openings for the anomalous experiences children describe. Maybe children maintain a closer, more fluid relationship with expanded consciousness than most adults, who've learned to narrow their attention to match consensus reality. This raises an uncomfortable question about development: what if growing up means not just gaining new capacities but also losing certain natural abilities to perceive beyond the ordinary? Perhaps what we call maturation is partly a training in forgetting, a process of learning to ignore whole dimensions of experience as we become socialized into materialist frameworks. When children report unusual perceptions, maybe they're not failing at reality testing. Maybe they're showing us aspects of reality that most adults have learned not to see.

This is where Thomas ventures into territory that makes conventional scientists uncomfortable, though that's changing. She explores an idea gaining traction among consciousness researchers: what if consciousness isn't produced by the brain? What if it's the other way around, with consciousness as the fundamental ground of reality and physical matter as something that emerges from it? This flips our entire worldview inside out. Instead of brains generating consciousness, consciousness generates brains (and everything else).

If this post-materialist framework has merit, then children's reports of telepathy, precognition, communication with the deceased, or perception of non-physical realities don't need to be dismissed as impossible. They might represent children's more direct access to consciousness itself, unfiltered by all the conceptual frameworks and perceptual constraints that adults have internalized. Thomas examines ideas like collective consciousness and transpersonal fields (non-material dimensions that children may naturally perceive and interact with). The radical suggestion here is that taking children's experiences seriously, rather than explaining them away, could actually advance our scientific understanding of consciousness. Maybe these kids are trying to tell us something important about the nature of reality, and we keep changing the subject because we're not ready to hear it.

For all its philosophical depth, the book's most practical contribution might be its guidance for the adults in children's lives. Thomas emphasizes something deceptively simple: the critical importance of creating safe, non-judgmental space where children can share unusual experiences without fear of being dismissed, pathologized, or ridiculed. When adults respond with curiosity and respect rather than alarm or skepticism, children learn their own perceptions are trustworthy. They develop healthy relationships with all aspects of their consciousness.

The book offers a framework for discernment that many parents and professionals desperately need. How do you tell the difference between genuine spiritual or consciousness phenomena, ordinary developmental imagination, and signs of distress requiring clinical attention? Not every anomalous experience needs intervention, but some genuinely do. Thomas argues that countless children have been unnecessarily medicated or subjected to psychiatric treatment for experiences that, properly understood and supported, could have been integrated as meaningful aspects of their development. By grounding professionals in consciousness research and post-materialist science, this work has genuine potential to transform clinical practice. More than that, it prevents the kind of harm that comes from pathologizing children's natural perceptual capacities. The book ultimately invites us to reconsider what we think we know about childhood, consciousness, and the nature of reality itself. Maybe the children have been trying to teach us all along.