The Lilliputians in the vegetable patch - IP

In literature, we often stumble across inventions—names, ideas, phrases—that become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we forget their origins. Take Wendy, for instance. Before J.M. Barrie brought Peter Pan to life, the name Wendy didn’t exist. A fictional character now synonymous with youth and innocence created not only an identity but a legacy. It’s a delightful reminder of how fiction can seep into the every day, giving life to something entirely new.

Then there’s 1984. Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece gave us terms that, once chilling in their bleakness, have since become common shorthand in our political discourse. Big Brother now represents the all-seeing, omnipresent government, and Doublespeak describes the art of political manipulation through deceptive language. Once speculative fiction, now practical tools for interpreting the world around us.

Another charming and enduring contribution to our cultural lexicon comes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In it, we encounter the Lilliputians—tiny people in a tiny world, their absurdities mirroring our own. The term “Lilliputian” now refers to anything that is comically small, and, funnily enough, even finds its way into medical journals to describe certain hallucinations where people perceive tiny figures—Lilliputian hallucinations.

From whimsical names to dystopian warnings, these literary creations continue to shape how we see the world, sometimes taking on a life of their own. They blur the lines between imagination and reality, reminding us that fiction often leaves a more permanent mark than we might think.

And so it was, when my father saw the little folk...

I arrived at my father's house early one crisp autumn morning. He had been up for hours, already wandering around in his old, tatty dressing gown and felt slippers, soaked through from the dew. From his bedroom window, he had seen them—tiny figures, the little people, he called them. They had the most delightful smiles. So, he had gone out to the vegetable patch to see them up close. But they were shy, elusive. Still, the brief encounter left him radiant, as if he had tapped into some deep reservoir of peace.

"They’re very smartly dressed," he told me with a calm, zen-like composure. He looked almost beatific. "If I see them again, I’ll point one out to you."

But they never appeared when I was around.

I had come to check on my father in those early days of the pandemic. He’d started behaving oddly—little things at first. His wife had dementia, and he was the one keeping track of her medication. When I glanced at his notes, I saw the pattern. Some days were blank, others had double doses. He was still driving too, but on one trip to the shop, he nodded off at a red light. I had to shake him awake.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said, waving it off as if it were nothing. But as soon as we got home, I took his keys.

“If you need anything, just call me. I’ll get it for you.”

Over the next few months, we went from doctor to doctor. Was it Parkinson’s? Something alcohol-related? He had developed sleep apnea which meant that he was somehow failing to breathe when he nodded off. Perhaps this lack of oxygen to his brain was the cause of his visions. I even wondered if he had some kind of infection, like septicemia, building up toxins in his blood. The pandemic made it worse, and harder to get answers. He was becoming more erratic, and one day, during one of his better spells, he recited a poem to my sister:

“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

He was near tears when he finished. My sister gently asked, “Is that how you feel, Dad?”

He nodded sadly, wistfully, but he was adamant he wasn’t imagining them.

That’s when I started to think it might be Lewy Body Dementia, where hallucinations—particularly tiny figures—are common. But when I suggested it in front of my father, the doctor ruled it out. Dad didn’t seem to mind that I was talking for him and even suggesting that what he was seeing wasn’t actually there. Another visit, another dead end.

I researched endlessly alongside my siblings, trying to put the pieces together. The "little folk" seemed almost diagnostic to me—Lilliputian hallucinations, they call it. Seeing tiny people or objects, vivid enough to feel real. He would try to talk to them, but they were never there.

He was slowly getting less mobile, and his face—his smile—it looked like he was about to cry all the time. His eyes would water uncontrollably, a telltale sign of something deeper, something wrong with his nervous system.

Then, the world shut down. Lockdowns meant we couldn’t visit. I called him as often as I could, but his voice grew thinner, fainter until it was almost a whisper.

One night, I got a call. I was told to come quickly, that he might not make it through. I was there within minutes, but by then, he couldn’t even acknowledge me, head almost sunken in between his shoulders.

I called emergency services, and they rushed him to the hospital. Four long months followed, with him being moved from ward to ward, cut off from visitors due to the pandemic. And then to a nursing home and back to the hospital and again in a strange dance with various care facilities. When he finally passed, it wasn’t until after his death that we got the answer: Motor Neuron Disease.

I wonder if his little folk were there to comfort him, to offer something magical in his final days. They brought him some peace, even if they were only ever real to him.