Alchopwn said:I have already contributed it to a collection of fae encounters, so why not.
In my childhood my family lived in Melbourne Australia, and I have always considered Australia a second home. When I was 11 years old in 1979 we went on a camping expedition to a place called Lakes Entrance, which is an unusual estuary area, and we went into the bush for a picnic with another family my father knew from work.
The girls were doing boring things, so I hung around with the men, and they had it in their heads to go looking for old gold mine workings in the area, so I tagged along. There were 3 of us. After hiking a few km, my father said that he was concerned about the possibility of us falling into a mineshaft, so he told me to wait in the bed of a seasonal stream that was now dry, and that he and his friend would return in a bit. I thought this was a terrible idea and said so, as I wasn't confident they could find their way back to me, but I was a kid, so I had to do what I was told.
Anyhow, I had waited for 10 minutes or more and was biding my time sitting on a log in the stream bed when I noticed an abnormally large pink butterfly fluttering near a thistle. I rolled my eyes in disinterest that this was all I had to amuse me, but the butterfly seemed very intent on that thistle, and eventually I realized that it was too damn big to be any butterfly I knew of, being larger than both my hands, and I wasn't aware of any pink butterflies in Australia, so I went over to have a look.
As I approached, the damned thing seemed to fold in on itself. First it became like a flat kewpie doll with wings as if it were cut from the pages of one of those kids fashion books of the era where you cut out and tabbed a dress onto the flat model girl. From there it popped into something that looked more like a regular cellulose 3d kewpie doll with wings, and then it folded again into a fully detailed and delicate little pixie/sprite creature, which still ignored me as it "worked" on the thistle. I got to within about 2m of it and watched it closely for a long time as the pretty little thing went about its business flittering about the blossom of the thistle in the stream bed.
After a while I heard the heavy footfall of my father and his friend returning, and so did the faerie, and she began to flutter off further along the stream bed, with me calling out to my father to follow me while in hot pursuit of the faerie. Having gone a couple of hundred meters and turned a couple of bends in the stream, I realized that racing off into the Australian bush in pursuit of a faerie might not be the wisest course of action, so I gave up and returned to my sheepishly idiotic looking father who had not understood a damn thing I was calling for him to do. So I told him I couldn't believe he missed it, and that I'd tell him what it was later, which I did. He didn't dismiss the idea, and my mother and sister were enchanted by my story.
In retrospect, it must be said that this was a very European white skinned looking faerie, but then it was a very Scotch looking thistle... Go figure. Australia doesn't have any pink butterflies in the area I was in at all, and certainly nothing close to that size which would have been about 5-6inches by 4 inches.
As to the folding of its shape I witnessed, having become more of an expert in faerie lore, I now believe that what I saw was called "the Glamour", which was an illusion faeries use to disguise themselves. I had no idea what I was looking at when it was happening. What is even more interesting however is that what I witnessed was akin to origami and mathematical modeling of a 4th spatial dimension that I have since seen. I suspect now that faeries can fold in and out of our dimension, and this is why we don't see them very often.
I think I can rule out hallucinating on environmental pathogens as a cause, as this was the only unusual thing I saw all day. I also don't think I was having some sort of hallucination in general, as I could hear the noises of the bush perfectly well while looking at the faerie. Hallucinations of an audial nature seldom if ever occur in tandem with a visual hallucination and vice versa. Being an 11 year old boy I was long over any notion of believing in faeries, and never really had at any time considered them to be real as far as I can remember, prior to seeing one IRL. Make of this what you will. I have never sought to profit from this story in any way, and I am aware that some people will think I am crazy, but I know what I saw, and this is how I remember the incident to the best of my ability, and in all honesty. Needless to say I was very struck by the experience and remember it in a decent amount of detail all these years later.
as one who has had many Fae experiences, this account rings 1000% TRUE. . Thanks for sharing.