Striking similarities exist between childhood experience and adult altered states of consciousness.

Shared features include vivid imagery, blurred self-boundaries, a sense of timelessness, and intense emotion.

Children’s transcendent ways of knowing resemble states adults seek through altered states of consciousness.

Systematic developmental and neuro-phenomenological research is needed to understand childhood consciousness.

Anyone who has spent time with young children knows they have a way of saying things that make you pause and reconsider what you thought you understood. Many report non-ordinary experiences—moments of “just knowing,” feeling outside their bodies, or sensing a deep unity with the world around them. These accounts suggest a form of consciousness that is relational, pre-linguistic, and not yet organized around a solid, separate self.

Research by Donna M. Thomas at the University of Lancashire, which I discussed in a previous Psychology Today post, found that children ages 4 to 5 often describe consciousness as something holistic and love-infused—a connective force linking them to family, nature, and even a purposeful universe (Thomas & O’Riordan, 2024). Notably, they do not equate consciousness with an individual “me.” By ages 10 or 11, however, this shifts. Children begin to define consciousness as “I-ness”—an inner presence distinct from roles, relationships, or passing thoughts (Thomas, 2022).

In a recent preprint, Donna Thomas and I teamed up to explore the striking parallels between these early exceptional experiences and adults’ pursuit of altered states of consciousness (ASCs). While children may slip naturally into states of self-transcendence or extrasensory sensitivity, adults often rely on “gateway tools” to revisit similar territory—meditation, prayer,........

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