Many things occur at the edge of vision. People walk by, cars zoom along, dim stars twinkle in the night sky, then disappear if you look at them directly. Mostly we don’t pay attention to those things unless we want to, like seeing the star, or unless they look as if they might pose a danger or require our attention. How our brains sort out in an instant whether we ought to pay attention is testament to its amazing power.

More generally, thousands—millions—of things occur at the edge of awareness—visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory. If you pay attention, for example, you will likely hear at some level the crickets of tinnitus in your ears. Or you’ll notice a low level of smell you’ve been ignoring. Or you’ll notice the feel of your clothes, which otherwise you ignore unless they’re wet or binding somewhere. And mostly, you don’t pay attention to taste unless you’re eating or drinking, or you’ve been on a thirty-hour travel ordeal through the world’s airports, and your mouth tastes like the dirty laundry basket.

But the point is, we ignore huge amounts of sensory input because it is a distraction. It has nothing to do with what we are doing. We have to get on with our day, and those things don’t matter to us. The brain is essentially a reductive organ, as Aldous Huxley said in Doors of Perception. It filters out massive amounts of stimuli that, if we paid attention to, would keep us from getting anything done.

Now here’s a fantasy/sci-fi kind of thought. Suppose there are entities that exist in the periphery of our perception, knowing we won’t look, we won’t listen, and if we do, they can slip back into oblivion as if they were never there. Or if you really want to descend into paranoia, suppose these entities are always behind you when you are alone, and fast enough to move out of the way when you turn to try to catch them. Ha.

Now suppose those entities have always been with us: faerie, Sidhe, leprechauns, interdimensional beings of various sorts. Why would they be here?

Could be a story in this.