The Peacock

26 Months:

“Mama, do you see that peacock over there?”
“No, honey. I don’t see a peacock.”
“I don’t see one either.”

Hallucinations aren’t uncommon in youngsters. Most kids under about four years of age hallucinate pretty regularly, seeing all kinds of fantastic creatures and people and things that, in an older child or adult, would be a sign of a serious mental health problem. It takes only the power of suggestion to cause a toddler to see something that, to everyone else, just isn’t there.

The reason? As kids are just learning how to use language, it serves a double-purpose of molding the world around them. It’s no coincidence that the mythologies of many cultures say that the world was sung or spoken into being. The most primitive, childlike parts of our brains need only to hear words, and they will imagine whatever is being spoken about. We all visualize things as we talk about them or hear about them, but, for a child too young to discern fantasy from reality, those visualizations are right in front of them: visible. Palpable.

I still have clear memories of the time when I was young enough that words could affect me so powerfully. When I was three and my family had moved into a new house, my five-year-old sister told me that she had seen a man in my room. I don’t know if she was trying to scare me, or if she’d seen my stepfather, or if she herself was imagining things in an uncomfortable new environment. But from that night and for nearly a year afterward I was never alone in my room. There was a man, in a plaid button-up and torn blue jeans, standing on my bed. He never went away, but stayed there day and night, frozen and staring at me with his wide gray eyes that never blinked. I called him “My Imagination,” which I assumed was something like a guardian angel or a fetch, because that’s what my parents said he was when I knocked on their door late at night to tell them about the man on my bed.

Spooky stories and ghostly explanations aside, there is actually an entirely rational explanation for this. Someone had suggested to my impressionable, imaginative, toddlerish brain that there was a man in my room, and, easily molded by suggestion, my mind invented an image that would make it true. And, because it scared me and continued occupying many of my thoughts and words, it remained until my noggin matured enough to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

I think the same thing happened, albeit on a smaller and less life-altering scale, when my two-year-old asked me about a peacock in the corner of my room. We had just finished reading a book about peacocks and I guess they were on her mind. The only thing that it took to summon a “real” peacock into the room was a simple question asking if I saw it, too. The only thing that it took to make the sapphire fowl disappear was my answer of, “No.”

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to return to that state of being, in which any thing, thought, person, or idea can be brought to life with just a word or two. And then I remember that a world like that is full of fears and uncertainties, and that there is a reason that our brains eventually adapt to live in the more stable, less malleable world that we share with everyone else. Ultimately, I’m pretty glad that the phase of, “Do you see that peacock over there?” doesn’t last too long.