Lost At Sea Part 7

"Realize that if you are the parent of one of these spirits you have been given a wonderful, marvelous gift! Feel honoured that they have chosen you and help them develop to their fullest Indigo potential."

I decide not to tell Joel that I'm honored he's chosen me. It might turn him into a nightmare.

I TRACK DOWN DR. MUNCHIE. She lives in Derbyshire. I call her. She sounds very nice. She says it was the American authors Lee Carroll and Jan Tober who first identified the Indigos in their 1999 book The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived. The book sold 250,000 copies. Word spread, to Ipswich among other places, where Dr. Munchie was working as a GP within the government's Sure Start program.

"Sure Start is designed to give underprivileged children the best start in life," Dr. Munchie explains. "One mum came in talking about it. And I immediately saw how important it was."

Even though Dr. Munchie is a GP-that most pragmatic of professions-she's always been secretly spiritual, ever since she had a "kundalini experience" whilst doing yoga during her medical school years. And that's how she became an Indigo organizer. But, she says, I happen to be looking at the movement during a somewhat rocky period for them.

"There have been lots of reports of parents saying to teachers, 'You can't discipline my child. She's an Indigo,'" Dr. Munchie says. "So it's all a bit controversial at the moment."

"Do you sometimes think, 'What have I helped to unleash?'" I ask her.

She replies that in fact she sees herself as a moderate force in the movement: "For instance, lots of people think all children who have ADHD are Indigo children. I just think some are."

My guess is that the weird success of the Indigo movement is a result of a growing public dissatisfaction with the pharmaceutical industry. It's certainly true in the case of Simone, Oliver's mum. Simone told me that all the doctors ever really wanted to do with Oliver was dope him up with Ritalin.

"Ritalin didn't help him," Simone told me. Then she added sharply: "All it did was keep him quiet."

Novartis, the drug company that manufactures Ritalin, says that in 2002, there were 208,000 doses of Ritalin prescribed in the UK. That's up from 158,000 in 1999, which was up from 127,000 in 1998, which was up from just 92,000 in 1997.

I call Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Oxford University think tank the Inst.i.tute for the Future of the Mind. I tell him about these statistics.

"You've got two kids in a cla.s.s," he says. "One has ADHD. For that kid, Ritalin is absolutely appropriate. It turns their life around. The other kid is showing a bit of hyperactivity. That kid's parents see the drug working on the other kid. So they go to their GP ..." Martin pauses. "In some ways there's a benefit to being diagnosed with ADHD," he says. "You get a statement of special needs. You get extra help in cla.s.s... ."

And this, he says, is how the culture of overdiagnosis, and overprescription of Ritalin-type drugs, has come to be. Nowadays, one or two children in every cla.s.sroom across the U.S. are on medication for ADHD, and things are going this way in the UK too.

Indigo believers look at the statistics in another way. They say it is proof of an unprecedented psychic phenomenon.

ON FRIDAY NIGHT I ATTEND a meeting of Indigo children in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a spiritualist church in the suburbs of Chatham, Kent. The organizer is medium Nikki Harwood, who also features in the doc.u.mentary My Kid's Psychic. (Nikki's daughter Heather is Indigo.) Nikki picks me up at Chatham station.

"There have been reports of Indigo children trying to commit suicide-they're so ultrasensitive to feelings," Nikki tells me en route in her minivan. "Imagine having the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you in your head. One thing I teach them is how to switch off, so they can have a childhood." Nikki pauses, and adds: "In an ideal world, Indigo children would be schooled separately."

Inside the church eleven Indigo children sit in a circle.

"One kid here," Nikki whispers to me, "his dad is a social worker." The youngest here is seven. The oldest is eighteen. His name is Shane. He's about to join the army.

"That doesn't sound very Indigo," I say.

"Oh, it is," Nikki replies. "Indigos need structure."

And then the evening begins, with fifteen minutes of meditation. "Allow your angel wings to open," Nikki tells them, and I think: "I came all the way for this? Meditation?"

"I was with a baby the other day," Nikki informs the cla.s.s. "I said, 'h.e.l.lo, sweetheart,' with my thoughts. The baby looked at me shocked, as if to say, 'How did you know we communicate with each other using our thoughts?'"

The Indigo kids nod. Indigo organizers like Nikki and Dr. Munchie believe we're all born with these powers. The difference is that the Indigo children don't forget how to use them.

Then Nikki produces a number of blindfolds. She puts them over the eyes of half the children and instructs them to walk from one end of the room to the other.

The idea is for the unblindfolded kids to telepathically communicate to the blindfolded ones where the tables and chairs and pillars are. Nikki says this is half an exercise in telepathy and half an exercise in eradicating fear.

"Part of the reason why you're here," she tells the children-and by "here" she means on this planet as part of a super-evolved Indigo species-"is to teach the grown-ups not to feel fear."

The exercise in telepathy begins. And it gives me no pleasure to say this, but blindfolded children immediately start walking into chairs, into pillars, into tables.

"You're not listening, Zoe!" shouts Nikki, just after Zoe has collided with a chair. "We were [telepathically] saying 'Stop!'"

"I can't hear!" says Zoe.

Still, these children are having far more fun learning about their religion than most children do.

I wander down to the front of the hall. Children's drawings are tacked up on a notice board-drawings of past lives.

"I had people that waited on me," one girl has written next to her drawing of a princess. "I was kind but strict. Very rich, such as royalty."

"There's one girl here"-Nikki points out a little girl called Emily-"who had a real fear of being starved to death."

Lianne, Emily's mother, comes over to join us.

"She used to hide food all over the house," Lianne says.

"Anyway," Nikki says, "we regressed her, and in the past life she'd been locked in a room by her mum and starved to death."

"Emily is much better now," Lianne says, "since she started coming here."

Lianne says that, like many parents of Indigo children, she wasn't in the least bit New Age before the family began attending Indigo meetings. She was perfectly ordinary and skeptical. She heard about the Indigo movement through word of mouth. It seemed to answer the questions she had about her daughter's behavior. And she's very glad she came.

Nikki says Emily happens to be "the most Indigo person here, apart from my own daughter. Emily will go into the bathroom and see dead people. She sees them walking around the house. It used to terrify her. Will I introduce you to her?"

Emily is thirteen. She seems like a sweet, ordinary teenage girl. She offers to do a tarot reading for me. "Something is holding you back," she says. "Tying you down. You don't look very happy. You're a little goldfish. Your dream is to turn into a big rainbow fish. It'll be a b.u.mpy ride, but you'll get there. Just don't be scared. You're Paula Radcliffe. You just don't think you are."

Earlier this year, the Dallas Observer ran an article about Indigo children.

One eight-year-old was asked if he was Indigo. The boy nodded, and replied: "I'm an avatar. I can recognize the four elements of earth, wind, water, and fire."

The journalist was impressed.

After the article ran, several readers wrote in to inform the newspaper of the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the cartoon, Avatar has the power to bend earth, wind, water, and fire. The Dallas Observer later admitted it felt embarra.s.sed about the mistake.

When the Indigo meeting is over, Nikki gives me a lift back to the station. "Does it freak the children out to be told they're super-evolved chosen ones?" I ask her.

"They were feeling it anyway," Nikki replies.

We drive on in silence for a moment.