It really is odd how little credit we give to a child's fears. Children, like other animals, seem somehow to have skills of detection that bypass adulthood. They can sense the existence of inexplicable symbols of what might be another world entirely, one that the adult eye is blinkered from acknowledging.

Is it possible that in another dimension altogether there are weirdly wonderful chimeras of nature's devising that she has placed in a parallel universe whose presence only the very young can detect? Strange versions of life stranded in that universe, lingering pensively and perhaps furious at their abandonment, making their homes in a universe that never sees the sun, where creatures bleakly exist without purpose, eyeing our own with the envy of the disadvantaged, might be hinted at by a child's cries of fear at what exists in the dark beyond the sight of adults, but visible to them.

Seventy-five years after I recall having had an experience that was truly inexplicable, one whose details I still recall, though blurred by time and distance, I still don't reject as implausible, and the hysteria of a very vivid imagination. I remember a trap door in a shed in a neighbour's yard and the invitation of a child who lived there to accompany her. I recall, carefully descending a series of steps carved into the earth, under the lifted trap door, and a burst of light and colour as my feet reached the level at which the steps stopped.

There, before me, was a bright landscape, an orphan landscape deep in the bowels of the earth and far from our life-giving sun, where green fields luxuriated under a bright light that elaborated detail and the vivid colours of proliferating flowers. I recall a small thatch-roofed cottage before which sat an old man, white-haired and frail, busily whittling away on a piece of wood.

I dimly recall returning to the world above, startled and confused by what I'd seen. And I remember trying to tell my parents what had happened to me, hesitant to for fear I would be blamed for doing something I shouldn't have, but wanting to share what I'd seen in the hope there might be an explanation offered.

And there was, only the explanation was in the realm of disbelief and a chiding that I couldn't offer any better reason why I had been missing for a length of time.

I've tried to puzzle out what has never left my mind and my memory, and I cannot. Are children gifted with extraordinary powers of perception ushered into their minds by a powerful urge to explore the world around us, and in the process daydreaming unlikely events into existence, even if only in their minds? Certainly most likely.

And hardly worth puzzling over, since it's a given, isn't it?