Hauntings, Poltergeists, and the Creative Spirit

When the psyche sends a mischievous visitor from the unseen world

A curious dream arrived one summer night.

I lay in bed beside my wife, Kate, when I heard what I took to be a ghost moving through our home. Small footsteps raced down the hallway toward the bedroom where our youngest daughter had been staying since returning from years abroad. The sound was unmistakable—light, quick, playful, as though someone delighted in being heard.

I got up and followed. A trace of apprehension accompanied me. Whatever moved through the house seemed to belong to another order of reality, and its sudden appearance was unsettling, startling, even shocking in its unexpectedness.

What I found was not so much a ghost as a poltergeist—a mischievous spirit who had somehow entered our home and was quietly taking up residence. How they arrived was unclear. What was clear was that they were here to stay.

Standing in the hallway was a child, perhaps six or seven years old, blonde-haired and dressed in white, accompanied by a small dog of similar coloring. Both appeared dusty and road-worn, carrying the grime of long travel. The child possessed the unmistakable energy of a street urchin—clever, playful, unconcerned with ordinary rules—and seemed genuinely pleased to have found a home.

I liked the child immediately. The dream offered no clear gender, only the sense of a being comfortable moving between worlds. I brought the child and dog into our bedroom and introduced them to Kate. We politely explained that our home was not theirs. The child listened with apparent interest but showed no intention of leaving. Neither did the dog.

They were here to stay.

Oddly enough, Kate and I liked them immediately. We were not entirely certain how we felt about these unexpected guests moving in, but we found ourselves taking to the dynamic duo nonetheless.

The practical matter soon became obvious. If they were staying, they would need baths and clean clothes. Street dust clung to both child and dog. They readily agreed, and together we began adapting to this strange new reality. Then the dream faded.

For days afterward, I found myself returning to the image. Not because it was frightening. Quite the opposite. The dream carried an atmosphere of warmth and recognition. Something had arrived from elsewhere and entered the household of our lives, bringing with it a fresh current of energy. What intrigued me most was the form this visitation had chosen.

The creative spirit had come not as a sage, angel, or ancestor, but as a mischievous child accompanied by a lively little dog.

The Nature of a Haunting

When most people hear the word haunting, they imagine spirits lingering in old houses, footsteps in empty rooms, or strange presences that refuse to disappear. The image has become so familiar that we rarely stop to ask why hauntings exert such power over the imagination.

The psyche often conjures the image of a haunting whenever something neglected seeks attention. What has been forgotten returns. What has been excluded appears at the threshold. What has been pushed aside begins knocking at the door. Emerging from the depths of the unconscious, it seeks recognition in the world of waking life.

Sometimes these hauntings take the form of unresolved grief. Sometimes they emerge through recurring dreams, persistent emotions, or old memories that refuse to remain buried. The psyche possesses remarkable patience, waiting years, even decades, for the right moment to present unfinished business.

Yet this dream carried a different feeling altogether. The child bore no wound, no accusation, no sorrow, no demand for justice. Whatever had arrived was not seeking restitution for some forgotten injury.

The atmosphere was warm, playful, and strangely familiar.

What appeared in the dream felt less like a ghost than a trickster—a gift-bearing poltergeist carrying a spark of creative mischief from another world.

The Mischief Maker

The trickster—including the poltergeist, often portrayed as a childlike haunting spirit—appears across nearly every spiritual and mythological tradition. Hermes steals cattle before becoming the gods' messenger. Raven tricks the world into transformation. Coyote rearranges reality through mischief. Loki disrupts the carefully maintained order of heaven and earth.

The trickster is rarely polite and never waits for permission. He, she, or they move according to a logic older than convention and largely indifferent to societal expectations. Their concern is not preserving comfort but serving life.

The purpose of trickster energy is movement. It appears when growth stalls, when life becomes trapped in repetitive patterns, or when certainty hardens into rigidity. Its impulse is toward what is generative, meaningful, and alive. Endlessly circling the same problems, digging deeper into familiar ruts, or surrendering to resignation serves neither psyche nor soul.

Whenever life becomes overly organized, overly certain, or imprisoned by structures that once fostered growth but now restrict it, the trickster appears. He loosens what has become rigid. He disrupts routines. He introduces uncertainty where certainty has become a prison.

This is one reason the trickster so often arrives disguised as a child. Children have not yet learned to worship control and predictability. They delight in wandering, exploring, asking inconvenient questions, and crossing boundaries that adults consider sacred.

As we age, we naturally develop attitudes and ways of being that help us navigate the world. We establish identities, cultivate expertise, and gain hard-won wisdom about how life works. These achievements matter. They have genuine value.

Yet every structure, no matter how useful, eventually risks being too small for the life trying to unfold within it.

The psyche knows this.

And so, from time to time, it sends a visitor.

The Creative Spirit at the Door

The longer I sat with the dream, the more it seemed connected to creativity itself.

Creative life rarely arrives through discipline alone. Discipline matters, of course. Every writer, artist, musician, therapist, teacher, and craftsman knows that meaningful work requires commitment. Yet commitment by itself does not explain inspiration, nor does it guarantee genuine creativity.

Anyone who has lived a creative life recognizes this mystery. We wrestle with a problem for days or weeks, and nothing happens. Then, while walking, showering, driving, or drifting toward sleep, the answer appears. An image arrives. A phrase emerges. A solution presents itself. Something unexpected enters awareness, carrying exactly what was needed.

William James spoke of "the More," a larger field of consciousness from which new possibilities emerge. Jung referred to the objective psyche. Religious traditions describe inspiration as spirit. Poets invoke the muse. Different languages point toward the same mystery: something arrives that is not entirely the product of conscious effort.

And when it does arrive, it often behaves less like a professor and more like a mischievous child.

The creative spirit is a notorious interrupter. It ignores schedules, disrupts carefully constructed plans, and leads us away from what we think we should be doing toward what life is actually asking of us. It enters uninvited, rearranges the furniture of the psyche, and refuses to leave.

Just like the child in the dream.

The Little Dog

Dreams are economical. Every image carries meaning.

The child did not arrive alone. A small dog accompanied him. Dogs often symbolize instinctual life—the natural intelligence that exists beneath rational thought. Long before human beings developed philosophies and psychological theories, instinct guided survival, relationships, and belonging. Dogs also evoke loyalty, companionship, and trust.

The child and the dog appeared together because imagination and instinct belong together. When imagination loses contact with instinct, it drifts into abstraction. When instinct loses contact with imagination, it becomes repetitive and compulsive. But when the two travel together, something extraordinary becomes possible. Creativity acquires roots, and instinct acquires vision.

The result is not merely productivity but aliveness.

Perhaps this explains why both visitors appeared slightly dusty and road-worn. They seemed to have traveled from beyond the neatly maintained borders of ordinary consciousness, carrying the dust of distant roads and unfamiliar landscapes. Before becoming part of daily life, they needed to be welcomed and cared for.

The psyche often works this way. New energies rarely arrive fully civilized. They come from elsewhere, carrying traces of the journey that brought them to our door.

The Child From the Future

Jung frequently observed that dreams do not merely reflect the past. They also anticipate possibilities not yet realized. The psyche possesses a prospective dimension, moving toward future development as surely as it remembers former experience.

Seen in this light, the meaning of the dream child changes entirely.

The child does not represent childhood so much as possibility. He had no intention of leaving. He arrived unexpectedly, took up residence, and seemed determined to remain in a household already inhabited by artists and writers. Something new was seeking entry, not as an idea but as a living presence.

Jesus spoke of becoming like little children. Jung described the child archetype as a symbol of renewal and future growth. Zhuangzi celebrated the spontaneous wisdom that emerges when life is allowed to follow its own nature. Across these traditions, the image points in a similar direction. The child is not simply who we once were. The child is also who we may yet become.

This is especially true in the second half of life.

Our culture often assumes aging is primarily a process of diminishment. Possibilities narrow, roles become fixed, identities harden, and the future gradually contracts. Dreams tell a different story.

Many of the most significant dreams of later life concern not endings but beginnings. They announce new relationships with mystery, imagination, spirit, and meaning. The psyche appears far less interested in retirement than it is in renewal.

Something fresh seeks entry.

Something playful.

Something alive.

When the Door Opens Inward

The phrase that kept returning to me after the dream was simple: they were here to stay.

In the dream, Kate and I were hesitant. The child ignored us, not rudely but matter-of-factly. He belonged with us, and the dog belonged with him. Their arrival was not negotiable.

That detail strikes me as important.

The deepest movements of the psyche are often not choices. They arrive as invitations we eventually discover we cannot refuse. A calling. A vocation. A creative impulse. A spiritual awakening. Sometimes they come disguised as a dream that quietly alters the direction of a life.

Something arrives from beyond the familiar boundaries of the self and announces its presence. The conscious mind protests. The ego prefers the known. Yet somewhere deeper, the soul recognizes what has happened and smiles, because the process has already begun.

It makes me wonder whether every genuine act of creativity begins as a haunting—not necessarily a haunting by ghosts, but by possibilities. By unlived life. By dimensions of ourselves waiting patiently beyond the edges of awareness. They linger in dreams, intuitions, synchronicities, sudden fascinations, and unexpected longings until they make enough noise that we can no longer ignore them.

Then we hear footsteps in the hallway.

We rise from bed and investigate.

And there, waiting in the dim light between worlds, stands a visitor carrying dust from another country of the soul. The visitor asks for neither worship nor obedience. It simply seeks a place at the table.

Our task is not to drive such visitors away. It is to welcome them, offer them a bath, find them clean clothes, and listen carefully to what they have come to tell us.

What first appears as a haunting may actually be the creative spirit returning home after a long journey, accompanied by instinct, mischief, and the quiet assurance that life remains larger than anything we have yet imagined.

The door is always waiting.

And it always opens inward.