Eight-year-old Oliver Banks thinks he sees dead people. Recently he thought he saw a little girl with black hair climb over their garden fence in Harrow, Middlesex. Then, as he watched, she vanished. When Oliver was three he was at a friend's house, on top of the climbing frame, when he suddenly started yelling "Train!" He was pointing over the fence to the adjacent field. It turned out that, generations earlier, a railway line had passed through the field, exactly where he was pointing.
Oliver's mother, Simone, was at her wits' end. Last summer, at a party, she told her work colleagues about Oliver's symptoms. He wasn't concentrating at school. He couldn't sit still. Plus, he'd had a brain scan and they'd found all this unusual electrical activity. And then there were the visions of people who weren't there. Maybe he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?
At that moment, a woman standing nearby interrupted. She introduced herself as Dr Munchie (her real name is Manjir Samanta-Laughton). She said she couldn't help but eavesdrop on Simone's conversation. She was, she said, a qualified GP.
"Well, then," Simone replied, "do you think Oliver has ADHD?"
Dr Munchie said no. She said it sounded very much like Oliver was in fact a highly evolved Indigo child - a divine being with enormously heightened spiritual wisdom and psychic powers. Oliver couldn't concentrate, she explained, because he was being distracted by genuine psychic experiences. She said Indigo children were springing up all over the world, all at once, unconnected to one another. There were tens of thousands of them, in every country. And their parents weren't all new age hippies. They were perfectly ordinary families who were realising how super-evolved and psychic their children were. This was a global phenomenon. Soon the Indigo children would rise up and heal the planet.
Perhaps, Dr Munchie said, given this new diagnosis, Simone and Oliver might like to attend an Indigo children meeting at the Moat House Hotel in Bedford? Channel 4 was going to be there. Maybe the TV crew could follow Oliver about?
Simone was desperate for answers. She wasn't going to close off any avenue. So that's how she and Oliver ended up appearing in the forthcoming C4 documentary My Kid's Psychic.
It is a touching but badly named programme. Oliver isn't psychic. He has ADHD. I telephone Simone after watching a tape of the programme. She tells me he's responding well to cod liver oil. In the documentary, Simone looks bewildered to be at the Indigo conference, which seems like an incongruous mix of hippies and spiritualists and normal but frazzled families like hers.
"That woman, Dr Munchie, seemed to be running it," Simone says. "Some of the people there were really away with the fairies. Most of them were. 'I see this and I see that.' One man was saying his children were 'the best people ever'. I don't want my child being called an Indigo child, thank you very much."
Still, Simone doesn't regret appearing in the programme: "It really helped Oliver enormously to learn that other people see things."
I track down Dr Munchie. She lives in Derbyshire. I call her. She sounds very nice. She says it was the American author Lee Carroll who first identified the Indigos in his 1999 book, The Indigo Children: the New Kids Have Arrived. The book sold 250,000 copies. Word spread, to Ipswich among other places, where she was working as a GP within the government's Sure Start programme.
"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" while doing yoga during her medical school years. (A kundalini experience is a spiritual awakening that sometimes occurs during yoga.) And that's how she became an Indigo organiser.
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."
No wonder that when Dr Munchie approached Simone at that party she was open to any idea, however nutty-sounding.
Novartis, the drug company that manufactures Ritalin, says that in 2002, 208,000 doses of Ritalin were prescribed in the UK. That's up from 158,000 in 1999, which was up from 127,000 in 1998, which was up from a paltry 92,000 in 1997.
I call Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Oxford University thinktank the Institute for the Future of the Mind. I tell him about these statistics.
"You've got two kids in a class," he explains. "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 class ..."
And this, he says, is how the culture of over-diagnosis, and over-prescription of Ritalin-type drugs has come to be. Nowadays, one or two children in every classroom across the US 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 basement of a Spiritualist church in the suburbs of Chatham, Kent. The organiser is the medium Nikki Harwood, who also features in the Channel 4 documentary. (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 ultra-sensitive to feelings," Nikki tells me en route in her people carrier. "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."
We pull up outside the church. Hoodies slouch around on nearby street corners. Inside, 11 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 18. 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 15 minutes of boring meditation.
"Allow your angel wings to open," Nikki tells them, etc, and I think: "I came all the way for this? Meditation?"
But then it gets a lot more interesting.
"I was with a baby the other day," Nikki informs the class. "I said 'Hello 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 smile and nod. Indigo organisers 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 un-blindfolded 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 are here," she tells the children - and by "here" she means put on this planet as part of a super-evolved Indigo species - "is to teach the grown-ups not to feel fear."
The children nod. And 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 at one point, 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 - 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 sceptical. She heard about the Indigo movement through word of mouth. It seemed to answer the questions she had about her daughter's behaviour. 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 13. 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."
"I'm fine," I think.
"You're a little goldfish," says Emily. "Your dream is to turn into a big rainbow fish. It'll be a bumpy 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 replied: "I'm an avatar. I can recognise 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 embarrassed 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.
"I've been police-checked," Nikki says, suddenly. "Another medium called the police on me. I've been accused of emotionally damaging the children."
"And what did the police do when they came?" I ask.
"They laughed," Nikki says. Then she pauses, and adds: "They told me they wanted to bring their own children here."
Maybe - I think - they were just saying that to be polite. Or maybe they really meant it.
· Cutting Edge: My Kid's Psychic is on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4
The Indigo Children. Super beings or a lie?
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Originally Posted by Marcus Scaurus
and throw some tanks at those puny inferior humans! 
And after we started to read what Wikipedia had to say about them, we found out I match the requirements for one. lol But not an good one. From what it says I'm more of the type to hum.. well in the words of my friend "start a war to see just who should stay and who should go" But I put it into much nicer terms 
. Yea But in the end I find it to be complete bs too. I mean come on from what they say nearly the entire world could claim to be one. And I don’t want to be an Indigo, I want to be an Diclonius! lol yea but still the part about being some what Spiritual or something might have some truth to it. Just yesterday when I was heading towards the mall and my friend was with me, right when I got into the car I said something bad will happen. Well on our way up a damn tractor-trailer nearly ran us over. And there was the one case in which my mother was driving and I had like an flash and said slow down. (The words just came out of nowhere) and about seconds later we nearly was in an car wreck. I would say we avoided it by just a few inches. But hey don’t believe me. After all I’m reading this and thinking man this guy is nuts.
