Dream - First contact

One time, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I went to bed a little early and fell asleep. I had a dream in which I was on a spaceship (one of ours), apparently as a visitor, just observing. It was a very large ship, and people occasionally went by, apparently on various errands or carrying out their duties. Everyone wore light-colored clothes.

A few people, perhaps just two or three, were near a machine built into one of the walls. The machine protruded from the wall, almost desk-like except the top sloped upward toward the wall and the sides sloped out toward the wall. At the wall, the top narrowed and joined a flat section that ran up the wall. The machine had lots of small grills and rectangular lights on its surface, though everything was relatively wide-spaced; that is, lots of blank metal existed on the machine's surface, between the sections of grills and lights.

The people were waiting for a signal from space aliens. I got the impression that some kind of signal had actually been received already, and they had already sent back a response. Now they were waiting for a second signal, a response back from the aliens. The dream had a peaceful, expectant feel to it.

All of a sudden, the machine started making a series of loud buzzes, like BUZZ-BUZZ, BUZZ. I think some of the lights started going on and off, too. I was suddenly filled with an incredible amount of terror. I forced myself to wake up, and while I was waking up I realized that I was waking up and I forced myself to sit up, so that there would be no chance that I could accidentally fall back to sleep.

By the time I was fully awake, I was sitting up in bed. People who had not gone to bed yet were still moving about in the house; I could hear them and see some of their shadows on the hallway wall. It was still early in the night. Evidently, I had started dreaming immediately upon falling asleep.

The dream is puzzling. Everything was peaceful as we waited for a signal from the space aliens. When the expected signal came, in the form of the loud buzzes and possibly the lights going on and off, I was suddenly terrified. I wonder if some reason outside the dream, something that I don't remember, exists for the terror.

Is someone calling my name?

An odd thing happened to me when I was very young. On its face it doesn't seem to involve UFOs, but some similar things have been reported by people who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens.

I was about 5 or 6 years old, living in a small town in Missouri. I was in the back yard, and I seemed to hear someone call my name, far, far away. I listened, looking in the direction it had seemed to come from, looking more at the sky than the town. I couldn't be sure I was really hearing anything, it seemed so far away. Still, I worried about it and finally decided to go looking to see if anyone had called me. I thought it might possibly have been one of the kids from school.

The house next to us in that direction had a tall, chain link fence. Somehow I got through it, through a gate between our yards and then through a gate at the back, and then along a drainage ditch and through other backyards. Finally, I reached a cross-street, which had new black asphalt paving, and I stood on a new sidewalk. The street had some traffic. It wasn't heavy, but I wasn't supposed to cross the street, and in any case, I didn't really want to try it, even if large gaps sometimes appeared between cars. So, my journey would end here, at the sidewalk. I looked around.

Down the sidewalk, some distance to my right, I saw a kid about my age. I went up to him and asked him if he had called me. Though I pressed him on the issue, he denied it and appeared very nervous that he was being confronted in this way. I finally gave it up and went back home, apparently retracing my steps.

I remember the beginning clearly, where I thought I heard my name being called, and I remember the street that I came to and the kid that I found, but the journey there and back seems almost dreamlike. Normally, I would never have gone on such a journey. And my mother doesn't remember a gate in the part of the fence that went between the yards.

I'm not saying that I was abducted by aliens (or anyone else) at that time, but the whole thing seems very strange and out of character.

UFO - A silver grain of rice against the sky

When my first remembered UFO sighting occurred, I was in school in the 7th or 8th grade in a city near Phoenix, Arizona. It was probably around 1966 or 1967.

For some reason, the class was on the playground behind the school, perhaps to draw the mountains in the distance for Art class. The sky was a brilliant blue, with only a few small clouds at the edges. I decided to look at the sky and see if I could find any UFOs. The sky was so bright, it was hard to look at. I kept squinting and turning away from it. I finally found something, like a silver grain of rice, far, far away. I looked at it for a while. It didn't seem to be moving, and it had no trail. It was just surrounded by the brilliant blue sky, with no reference points, so it was hard to tell if it was completely stationary. I finally decided to show it to another kid. After much pointing on my part, he finally saw it, too. It was very difficult to see, almost lost in the blue sky. He didn't know what it was, either. I finally went back to what I had been doing.

Much, much later, in the 1990s, I saw some strange things in the skies in Nevada. There are so many military bases there, though, that these were almost certainly military craft of some kind.

One time while driving at night I saw, flying over a small town that had a military base, the dark shape of a plane. All of a sudden, twin trails of glowing green smoke came from the wings. The smoke just came out for a second or two and then stopped. Chemtrails, perhaps?

Another time, while driving through the Nevada desert at night, I saw a triangular formation of lights flying around. It was too dark to see any details; all I saw was lots of lights in a triangular formation. I guess it could have been a group of planes flying very close together, in a very tight formation.

Dream - Captured and consumed

This dream, featuring extraterrestrial aliens, happened sometime in early to mid December of 2005.

The dream had been going on for quite a while, when I found myself in the jungle with several other people. It was very dark, but it was possible to see some, perhaps by moonlight. I seemed to be shorter than normal, and none of the people in the group was very tall.

Off a ways I could see some low hanging branches, just above head height. In the darkness above the branches, and apparently laying on the branches, were aliens with large black eyes and thin, gray bodies. I could feel them more than see them, although their eyes were dimly visible. They were waiting for someone to come under the branches, where they could catch them with their minds. I could feel the darkness from their minds from where I was.

I wasn't going to go over there, knowing what would await. The group of people I was with separated, though, with part of it going away from the aliens and part of it going under the branches where the aliens were, and becoming trapped. Not wanting to leave them to their fate, I went over there, too, and became trapped myself.

I could feel the darkness of the aliens' minds reaching out, like a light that shone darkness, and I could also see black tendrils of their minds descending in front of me, like vines forming the bars of a cage. I could move, but not much. It was like being trapped in tar. I twisted pitifully from side to side, as did the others.

Then, suddenly, I was spread-eagled on a table, with my arms and legs strapped down, and aliens were performing various procedures on me. I had my head turned to the side, and I tried very hard not to pay any attention to what they were doing, knowing that it would eventually be over, as had happened so many times before. The aliens were all around me, though most were a little ways off. I tried very hard not to look at or focus on them, because it was just too scary to do so.

Then I was somewhere else, and the aliens were requiring me to consume a long caramel-like string of some substance. It was being given to me end-on, and was slowly being fed to me. It was a light brown in color, and even tasted vaguely caramel-like, but less pleasant. The whole experience felt distasteful, but I continued with it.

Then, suddenly, I had a view of the situation from a different plane of existence. I saw my body, laying on its stomach. My body looked like a light yellow object, like something crudely carved out of butter. The legs were almost entirely gone, but I think some stubs remained for the arms. The rest had a somewhat eroded, frayed appearance. I felt I was looking at my energy body, what was left of it. The caramel-like string I was consuming was energy from the aliens, but several strings led away off my back, where they were consuming me. They were consuming a lot more of me than I was of them, and over the years that this had been going on, more and more of me had disappeared, until this was all that was left.

Then I was back to reality, with the fog of the aliens lifted from my mind. I saw that I was laying on my stomach on the gray floor of a gray room, and the string I was consuming came off the tip of the tail of a reptilian creature who was laying on its side at an angle to me. The creature had a heavy tail, very big legs and relatively small arms, and a big, dinosaur-like head. The creature might have been perhaps six to eight feet tall if it was standing up.

It was consuming the energy from me as I consumed the energy from it, and it lay there with closed eyes and a peaceful expression on its face. I felt that it enjoyed the exchange of energies, and perhaps obtained some benefit from it. I was getting by the far the worse part of the bargain, though.

Acting quickly, I broke off the last six to eight inches of its tail, got up, and ran away. It lifted its head up and peered back at its tail. Then it called out to me with its mind, radiating love and saying that everything was alright, and wanting me to come back.

I kept on running, though, through the jungle. I have the impression that it started chasing me, but I had a good head start on it, and it never caught up with me, at least not while the dream continued. I have the impression, though, that I came upon some new kind of situation, just as the dream ended.

The noisemaker

About 12 to 15 years or so ago, I had a strange experience early one morning.

I was sleeping, and I heard a strange, loud buzzing sound.

I was instantly awake, and went rapidly out of my bed and across the room to where the noise was coming from.

It was coming from a little plastic box, sitting on a piece of furniture.

I had no idea what the box was. I picked it up nervously and looked it over, knowing that I somehow had to make it stop. On the side that was initially facing me, it had a clear plastic cover with writing of some sort under it. A rectangular button was on the top. An electrical cord was attached low on the back, and higher up some kind of thin prong stuck way out.

I had no idea what any of it meant, or why it was making this sound, but I felt it was very important that I somehow stop it. I didn't know what to do, though, or what to push. I didn't know what might happen if I actually did anything. I might do something unfortunate, something unwanted, if just started poking things.

I kept feeling, though, that the prong at the back was important, and that I should push it. Not knowing what else to do, and hoping that nothing bad was going to happen, I finally pushed it.

The noise went away.

Standing there in the silence, holding the object, it slowly came back to me that this was my alarm clock, and that the alarm had gone off, as it was supposed to. Pushing the prong on the back had turned the alarm off. The button on the top was the snooze button, which I hadn't been interested in using.

In a partial defense, I should state that at the time I had not been getting much sleep, but I have had many similar times without much sleep where nothing like this has happened. (Not to say that some confusion has never occurred, but nothing quite this bad.)

Pouring water, hot and cold

Around 8 or 10 years ago, an odd thing happened to me.

I was trying to fix one of those instant soup cups. This particular cup was made of heavy paper, and I was supposed to peel the lid back halfway, fill the cup with boiling water, stir, and then put the lid back on and let it sit for a few minutes.

I had a tall electric pitcher to heat water in, so I heated the water until it was boiling rapidly and steam was pouring out. I decided to hold the soup cup over the sink while I poured, in case I spilled something. The paper lid wouldn't stay back by itself, even when folded, so I had to hold it open while I poured. I was trying to hold the cup in one hand, hold the lid back with my thumb, and pour the boiling water into the cup without actually spilling any on me. It was very awkward. The heat was coming through the paper sides of the cup and burning my fingers, and I was trying to pour the water in quickly so that I could set the cup down, when all of a sudden I poured the water over my fingers.

Oddly enough, it didn't hurt. It just felt cool. The heat from inside the cup was burning my fingers too much, though, and I had to set the cup down.

The outside of my fingers, though, where the water had flowed, seemed fine. There was no pain and nothing was visibly wrong with them. I turned the faucet on and ran some water over them, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

The water inside the cup had been so hot that the cup was too hot to hold, but the water poured directly on my fingers, other than the sense of coolness, had had no effect.

Somebody must have been watching over me. Again.


NOTE: Don't try this at home.

Dream - The contest

A small man in late middle age made his way between two houses through a yard partially strewn with garbage.

He reached the sidewalk and continued along it. The sidewalk also had garbage in places, but was generally thinner and flatter in this regard then the yard had been, though sometimes the garbage covered large areas.

The man had a cane with him, that he held in his right hand. The cane was much too long to lean on, and he held it out well in front of him and tried to somehow use it to pull himself forward by putting the point of it on the sidewalk and pulling down. He was hindered in this by the length of the cane and its thinness, and its excessive flexibility, which gave it a wobbly feel.

When he walked, he moved forward with an odd motion, with one leg taking a short step and the other more of a bound, sometimes a tremendous bound. Sometimes he seemed to have more trouble and went forward on all fours, still using the cane to try to pull himself forward.

Once, he stopped and actually got the cane beside him and pushed down hard enough that his whole body slowly rose into the air. He stayed there for a while, one hand on the cane and his body in the air at an upward angle, then he slowly straightened his body out until his feet were pointed straight up. The cane flexed and wobbled and snapped back and flexed again, and you would think that it would break under the weight, but it didn't. Eventually, he lowered himself to the ground and went on as before.

After a time, some kids in the neighborhood saw him, teenagers, and they made fun of him and were going to make trouble for him.

He proposed instead that they have a contest.

He showed them the garbage in a nearby yard. There were many onions, whole and uncut, looking like they had just come from the store. There were thick hamburger patties, still pink but cooked just enough to change color slightly. There was lettuce cut into thick slabs, and open hamburger buns. There were even some thin slices of tomato. Some of the items even had a little ketchup on them. There was more than enough food for everyone.

The man proposed that they have a race to see who could prepare a meal the fastest. The meal would be large enough to serve everyone there. Two fires would be started on the sidewalk to cook the meat. The first side to get the food fully prepared and ready to eat would win.

The side with the teenagers quickly began working. The man looked through some of the food that he had gathered and placed on a picnic table near the sidewalk. A girl had been assigned to help him, to make the contest more fair. She seemed to be slightly familiar with him, evidently from seeing him on his walks in the past, but she mainly just sat and watched him. There were perhaps three or four people in the other team.

The man discarded some of the slabs of lettuce, because they showed some signs of wilting at the edges. In truth, though, much of the remaining ones did not look very different from those that had been discarded. This disturbed the man, because he did not want to serve the others food that was not good quality.

Abruptly he got up, and, leaving his cane behind, raced home at incredible speed, getting there in an instant, before the kids even knew that he was gone. One of them looked up and somehow saw him there, despite the distance involved, and made an exclamation, surprised that he could have gotten there that fast, or that anyone could.

At home, the man gathered a thick package of raw hamburger, a head or two of lettuce, and some tomatoes. He also selected some sharp knives to cut things with, and grabbed some ketchup and a bag or two of chips and some cans of soft drink. He then rushed back and quickly prepared the meal.

Afterwards, everyone was sitting around a table, happily eating. One of the girls came forward, though, and stood in front of the man and accused him of cheating, of getting food that was already prepared. Considering the situation, it was a dangerous accusation to make.

The man looked up from his hamburger and stared into space, not looking at the girl or at anyone. He did not reply directly to her, but instead said, philosophically, "Death goes where it will, and when one reaches the place where he had been going, he never knows whether death will find him there. Most times, though, it does not. Anyway, in any case, no one expects death, but death will eventually come."

And the people continued eating, then, happy with the food.

And in the future, when the man was out on his walks, his journeys, and happened to see the kids, they called out to each other and greeted each other like old friends, which now, of course, they were.


-a story from a dream I had the night of December 17-18, 2005.

Dream - Possible futures and what came after

Early in June 2005, on a Sunday night, I had a strange dream.

In the dream, it was night and I was at my computer. I was looking at a lot of documents in a lot of moderately small windows. The windows seemed to be part of some larger program that filled the screen behind them. The documents didn't seem to contain much, just a few characters in some kind of alphanumeric code. I think many or most may have had just two characters.

I was puzzling over them, and my mother kept interrupting me. She was wandering around in the house going through things. It felt like there was a real strangeness to the night.

There were two little dogs in the house, and they were up, too, and we finally decided that maybe they wanted to go outside. We let them out back and they seemed happy. When I looked at them a few seconds later, though, they were far, far down from the door, in vertical distance. Somehow, the house had become multi-story and I was on at least the second floor. The door that the dogs went out of now just opened into empty space.

I walked from the kitchen to what would normally be the dining room and then the family room, but the house had grown huge. A few other people were there, too. I don't know who they were exactly, but I think they were supposed to be relatives. They generally looked young, like they might be teenagers. There was a long narrow room along the edge of the house, and it seemed to have a small balcony associated with it. I went and looked out. It wasn't quite so dark now.

I saw the next-door neighbor's house, which was also huge, and much farther away than it had been. I could see the back better than the front, and it had a very large, tall garage-like area that apparently came through from the front. A very large, tall, pointed tent partly stuck out of it, made of black, tattered cloth, virtually in shreds in places. A similar tent was in his backyard. I seemed to be on the third floor.

I turned back to the long, narrow room, which had doubled or tripled in width. I came somehow to understand that this was an alternate future, and I had somehow switched over to it. I was then essentially given a bit of a tour through the long room. I met a couple more young people, and then I came across a very strange person sitting on a small, old couch.

The person looked human, but not quite. His face had some dog-like qualities. The lower part of his face seemed stretched somewhat, and the upper lip projected forward in a bit of a point. I think his ears may also have been long and floppy, but I'm not sure. He didn't move much, he just sat there with his arms stretched out on the back of the couch. His eyes looked at me from time to time, mainly when he spoke. He didn't say much, except brief responses to what was said to him. I knew somehow that he was really a dog, one that had been genetically engineered in this now future (but still alternate future) time. I felt that he knew of his situation and was satisfied with it.


Then I was outside, farther in the future. It was night. There was barren ground, with a rise and a few people standing on it. I was aware of an occasional very large building, very far apart. Dark, reddish clouds were low overhead. I felt that they were toxic, and that the whole Earth, or most of it, looked like this.

I was given the story, in my mind, of what had happened. There used to be a big building, huge, very wide and several stories high. A smaller, square area projected several more stories toward the back. This building was the headquarters of a major aerospace firm. In the smaller area that rose toward the back, there was a conference room where executives from a rival firm had come to talk about merging or combining the two companies.

Everything in the meeting was going fine, the executives were happy and jovial and laughing with each other, but outside the room, some employees had become worried. They were afraid that something bad was happening in the room, and they tried to get in to protect their boss and their company. They knocked and banged on the walls, but they couldn't get in. They finally tried to blow holes into the room with explosives.

The CEO heard the noise and the explosions, and thought the building was being attacked by a rival. Rather than let the building fall into the rival's hands, he pressed the button to self-destruct. The entire building blew up and was completely destroyed. The repercussions of the event brought about a rapid series of events that eventually resulted in the destruction of the surface of the Earth.

I was shown two planes that were planned but now would never exist, except as prototypes (and I'm not sure about whether the prototypes actually existed). One of the planes was by this company and one was by its rival. I remember one of the planes had its whole nose open in a huge intake tunnel for the engines, and had one wing that trailed back fairly normally and one on the other side that was tiny and curved forward and upward. Somehow the shape of the tiny wing was supposed to balance out the full-sized wing on the other side. I don't remember what the other plane was like, but it seemed less visually remarkable. There would have been other planes that would never happen, of course; these were just examples that were shown to me.


Then, somehow, the building was back again. Some of the people had managed to go back through time. They wanted desperately to prevent the disaster from happening. I was with them, but I seemed to be somewhat older than I am now (I am currently 51). Instead of having dark brown hair with just a little gray, it now seemed to be all gray.

The other people seemed to be employees of the company, but they must have been somewhere else when the building exploded. They were all fairly young, probably in their twenties, and not particularly tall. I was not as tall as I used to be, but I was still taller than them.

I seemed slimmer than normal, too, and my face was different in some way. I think it may have had some fine lines on it, but it was more than that; it was like I was in someone else's body.

The conference room was mostly composed of huge walls of heavy glass. We were picking up little odds and ends and throwing them at the walls. The impacts made little tapping noises, but the people inside didn't seem to notice. The people outside desperately wanted to get inside and warn the CEO not to do it, that there wasn't any attack and the company wasn't in any danger.

I started trying to bang on the glass with little objects that I found, but the glass wouldn't break and only little tapping sounds resulted. I moved my hand around, trying to scratch the glass, but whatever I was holding wasn't good enough to do it. I picked up something a little heaver and more substantial, with some strong metal in it, and forced it against the glass and moved it around in a big, tall oval, but it just seemed to be leaving some scuff marks.

One of the people decided to try to blow a hole in the glass to get through. He brought some kind of plastic explosive over and smeared it all over in the center of the scuffed oval I had made.

I stepped back a bit and watched him, and something dawned on me. I told him that if he wanted it to happen as it did, to keep on going. He stopped and looked at it, then he stood there and stared at it.

Suddenly, to my left and around the corner, far down the wall a door opened and the executives came out, laughing and talking. We stared at them. The disaster had been averted.


Then the dream changed to a far future time, perhaps thousands of years in the future. The lifespan of people had been greatly lengthened, to hundreds and even thousands of years. I walked through a strange land, full of distorted little people. They were almost cartoonish, with short, impossibly thin arms and legs. Their heads and faces were human, but too big for their bodies and were distorted, sometimes too stretched vertically. The faces seemed to have a lot of fine lines in them, though the skin seemed tight.

As I walked by and looked at one person, his eye on the far side moved way down his face while the other eye, closer to me, moved way up his face and grew somewhat larger as he looked at me and I looked at him. It wasn't like the eyes had actually migrated, it was like the face had stretched and distorted.

Everyone was very short, probably three feet or less, sometimes much less, and they seemed to be engaged in various serf-like tasks. There were various small structures all over the place that provided a least a small bit of shade from overhanging stiff flaps held up by strong wood stems at one end, but they didn't usually provide too much in the way of walls. I got the impression that the structures were actually plants of some type.

There were also occasional large, fairly normal looking people, but still short by our standards, who seemed to be lounging on large wooden flaps that were shaped and/or grown. I came to understand that the vast majority of the people here in this distant future time were in fact the equivalent of serfs, with the rare large person being one of the extremely wealthy owners who lorded over the serfs. Everyone was even dressed in a vague, medieval kind of way.

I could see, a ways off, some actual buildings. They looked something like adobe structures, with tiny, dark windows.

Then, suddenly, two police or military type people were there. They were larger than the serfs, but still very small. They seemed to be wearing some kind of hugely padded armor, with an enormous rounded chest area and huge rounded areas on the shoulders. Their arms and legs were still short and skinny. The color of the armor was pale, washed-out bronze. They were each holding some kind of large futuristic weapon in their hands.

They fired their weapons, then, at some of the serfs who evidently weren't as docile as they should have been. I went over and ripped the head off of one of the police/soldiers. He continued to stand there, and no blood flowed. The other stood there, too, as if frozen.


Then I was in some large building, apparently one-story, in which some kind of party was taking place. The people seemed to be mostly young and fairly normal looking, but not very tall. I didn't seem to be very tall, either. After a while, I followed some people who went out some glass double-doors to a side area of the building or house. It was dark outside.

There was a small metal shed a little ways from the doors. The people went into it, and I followed them to the doorway of the shed and looked inside. The knowledge was then given to me that this was death, and that once people came into the shed they could never leave. In fact, since I was under the roof of the shed, I couldn't leave either. So I reached up with my hand and pulled on the lip of the roof of the shed.

I walked back to the house, then, pulling on the roof of the shed, which extended over me and continued to cover me, expanding like a telescope does. I reached the doors to the house and went through, the roof of the shed passing through things with no trouble.

I tried to call out and talk to some people I saw, but they didn't seem to see or hear me, though they seemed to sense something. I managed to pull the roof some more and got closer to some people and tried again. This time they seemed to hear me, at least some, and talked back, but when they turned to me, their eyes didn't seem to focus on me, like they couldn't quite see me and didn't quite know where I was. I was definitely getting on the end of my tether, though. I could feel the shed pulling at me, and finally retreated back to it.

I went all the way back and into the shed, which had quite a few other people in it, more than just the few that I had originally seen. After a while more people came, in groups, through the doorway and more groups faded in through the walls. The shed had a sunken floor, which was becoming much more sunken, and people were several layers deep. Some groups of people continued to stand, though, even with layers of people on top of them, as the weight didn't seem to be very much.


Then, suddenly, the shed, or at least it's interior, was going down like an elevator. After going down several stories, it deposited the people in a large underground area already full of people, all of which seemed to be having a good time. There were tables and bars and open areas. Everything seemed to be crudely constructed out of wood. The people seemed to be wearing some type of medieval clothing, for the most part, although the people at the house had been dressed more normally. I had noticed earlier that the people in the shed had tended to wear medieval-type clothes, though, some of them almost looking like pirates.

Some of the people here were drinking and some were talking and some were fighting each other, sometimes with weapons. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. I sat or stood at a small table/bar and a friendly man with a small beard talked to me for a while, though I think he may have partially or mainly talked with his mind.

He said that pretty much anything was allowed here, but it was possible to get too extreme. In the rare cases where somebody did do something too extreme, they were sent a few stories further down the elevator, and their soul was then dissolved. I could see in my mind the soul dissolving and spreading out and soaking into the earth.

He also said that a lot of the people didn't know that they were dead yet, and when they found out it could take some adjusting.

After a while I saw my mother come into the room, not from the elevator but from some other rooms that extended from the side. This underground area apparently had rooms and offshoots that went on for a great distance. She was much younger than when I had seen her last, and she didn't seem to notice me, though she wasn't really looking much in my direction. She seemed to be having a good time, but then she got a little frown on her face, and I felt that she had just found out that she was dead. She moved quickly off in a direction that was away from me, talking to people and wearing a little smile but still frowning.

I followed, trying to catch up with her. A lot of people were in the way, though, and I lost sight of her. A few people were on a small wooden platform, acting as entertainers, and the area was particularly crowded. I asked various people if they had seen her, finally even giving her name to them, but no one seemed to know anything.

I continued to go where I thought or hoped she had gone, and I came around a little corner and another small group of entertainers were in a raised area in a recess. They had some kind of musical instruments and were singing. They even seemed to have microphones. The one on the far end looked like Lurch from the Addams Family, except that he was made up to look like Frankenstein's Monster, with green skin and huge red cuts that were crudely stitched together. He looked at me and smiled as he sang.

Someone, maybe him or maybe someone else, it just seemed to hang in the air without a source, was saying, "You know, there might be a way out." Somehow, it was indicated to me that I should continue on off to the side and then go forward through some rooms. The area in question looked much dimmer than the area I had come from, which was brightly lit, though I didn't think about it at the time.

I started to go in the direction that was somehow given to me and all of a sudden I was outside, and alive again. I was in a wide open space that seemed to have a lot of low clouds and even some fog, in a body that was unfamiliar to me, a short young person, but still an adult.

The hidden spider

An odd thing happened perhaps 10 or 12 years ago.

I was getting ready to brush my teeth and looked at the tube of toothpaste laying on the counter. It was squeezed quite a bit in the middle, so I decided to move some of the toothpaste from the back toward the front. Instead of picking the tube up, I just pushed at it, probably using my thumb, until the back half of the tube was fairly flattened out and the toothpaste was mostly at the front.

When I picked the tube up, I found a partly crushed spider underneath it.

If I had just picked the tube up like I normally would have done, instead of pushing at it where it lay, the spider, uncrushed and alive, would have most likely been where my fingers would have gone.

Dream - In the Matrix

Almost four months ago, I had a strange dream that had some Matrix-like elements.

In the dream, a series of minor adventures occurred. I kept worrying about a cloud, though, that was off to my left at an angle. It was a dark cloud, almost black, and it had two eyes and two stick-like arms that extended down from it, bent, dividing at the ends into two stick-like fingers or claws. The cloud was pointed out to me by someone in the dream, and I was reminded of it occasionally as the dream progressed.

It was supposed to be approaching me, though it was actually pointed to the side and not right at me, and I never actually saw it move. When I looked at it from time-to-time, it did seem sometimes that it had gotten closer. It seemed to be something dangerous, although I'm not certain in what way, and sometimes I seemed to feel a hunger from it. I was concerned about the cloud coming, but I knew that there was no way to avoid it, that its arrival was only a matter of time. There was nothing I could do, other than to try and keep it in mind.

A time finally came, then, when the cloud was much closer, and then, suddenly, it was everywhere and I was inside it.

Everything felt different inside the cloud. There was a quietness, and it felt like the world had changed, and I think that somehow the world had changed, at least the part that was in there with me. My surroundings did not seem to be the same, and I appeared to be alone. The light was softer and maybe a little dimmer, but only a few wisps of gray cloud material were actually visible, smoke-like, at least nearby. There seemed to be a feeling of greater density around the border, which was quite a distance off. A figure was walking toward me along a broad area to the left, an area lit with soft light.

The figure came up beside me and a voice said, in my mind, that reality was not as we thought it was. That we placed construct on top of construct.

And I looked to a large area in front of me and to the right. It was filled with people and things. And the people and things started to disappear, several at a time, until, finally, reality itself disappeared. In its place was a vast flat plane, softly lit and soft-edged, colored like dark honey. At widely separated distances, tall, thin spikes went up, like sudden jiggles on a seismograph, and near the spikes were other people or entities, one-to-a-spike.

Beside me, on my left and slightly in front, a tall spike or spire went up. I felt that it actually came down, though, and embedded itself in the plane, the flat surface around me. The spike seemed to have a very thin sliver of a second spike associated with it, that did not extend upwards very far. The main spike was not actually circular in cross-section, but was significantly extended front-to-back, like a small wall that went up and up. And up. It extended a vast distance and then connected to a dark flat object sticking out far, far above me.

The object was another plane of existence, but one that had a leading edge on it. The edge was irregular and had a major rounded area in the center and lesser lobes to each side, much like the dark cloud had looked, at least in outline. The spike or spire or narrow wall went up and joined it on the bottom of the plane near the front, looking almost like the keel on a boat.

My awareness moved closer to the dark plane, and I could see small figures on it, looking down in different directions. I moved closer and I could see that they were short and somewhat thick, with rounded stomachs. They were human in appearance but were blue in color, a slightly grayed and darkened blue. They seemed to be dressed in pants and short, open vests, looking almost like pirates, though genies is an alternate explanation. I felt that one of them was the leader, the one that was looking most in my direction, or at least in the direction of my body. His head was bald on top, with very short, dark hair on the sides. He seemed to be directing the others in some way. They all seemed to be intent on something and very business-like in what they were doing.

I felt that they were concerned with watching over me in some way, protecting me, like guardian angels might do.

Blood poisoning

When I was perhaps five or six years old, and living in a small town in Missouri, a neighbor who lived a few houses down from us moved to another state, either Arkansas or Alabama. The neighbors had a young boy, somewhat younger than I was and closer to my brother's age. My brother and I used to play with him.

Sometime after they moved, my parents drove down there to visit them, in order that my brother and I could play with him again. We spent a few days there, staying at their house.

One day, while playing out in the yard in my bare feet, I stepped on something. I looked and a thorn was sticking into my heel. I took it out and continued playing. My heel bothered me later, though, and a red line eventually started to form. My parents said that it was an infection that I got from the thorn, blood poisoning. My parents decided to drive us home and see a doctor there, though, because we didn't know any doctors where we were.

On the long drive home I kept looking at my heel. The red line kept getting longer and was going partway up my leg.

Eventually, we made it home and found a doctor, who gave me a tetanus shot.

My mother says that the doctor told her that a few more hours and it would have been too late.

My father and the Air Force

In the early 1950s the draft was in effect, so my father joined the Air Force so he wouldn't be drafted and risk end up being a foot soldier in the Army. We moved from Missouri to Texas for a while, then to either St. Louis or Kansas City, I don't remember which. I was just a baby, then, so this is something that was told to me. My mother didn't like the big city (and she really hated Texas), so she eventually moved back to her parents' farm and my father visited us when he was on leave.

My father had to be in the Air Force for quite a while. I think it was four years of active duty and then four years of reserve, where he might be called back again. I remember one time on the farm when he came home on leave, watching him in his uniform as he walked, grinning, across the yard.

I was glad when he finally finished his active duty and could stay with us.

I remember watching him, later, probably sometime in the mid to late 1950s, as he used a razor blade to cut the stitches holding his Air Force emblems to his uniforms. He was going to use the uniforms as work clothes. We lived in town at the time.

While in the Air Force, he had become a sergeant of some kind. One of the things he did was teach classes in something. He was given a gift of appreciation by the people he had taught or been otherwise associated with, I'm not sure which. It was in the form of a dark blue toy truck with a long flatbed holding an airplane, with lots of cotton behind it representing clouds. There was also a banner on it saying something about that it was in appreciation for his services to such-and-such number such-and-such division or unit or squadron. Something like that. We kept it for a long time. We moved several times over the years, though, and one time, decades later, we discovered when we took it out that bugs had gotten into it and made a mess of it. After looking at it, we reluctantly decided to throw it away.

I wish now that we had kept it.

Paper airplanes

When I was little, maybe five or six, I went to Sunday School for a while with my little brother. One time, while we were waiting for the teacher to come back, some other kids started making paper airplanes and tossing them. I was fascinated by it. I had never seen such a thing, and got one of the kids to show me how it was done. After that, I knew how to make paper airplanes.

Somewhere, in some kind of school or schools, I also learned how to make paper boats and paper Pilgrim hats. That was later, though.

My mother tries to teach me about God

When I was little, perhaps four or five, my mother tried to teach me about God. She talked about him always being there even if I couldn't see Him. I said, "Where? Where?" and stuck my arms out and started waving my hands, like I was trying to feel Him. She tried to tell me that I couldn't feel him either, but I kept doing it.

She started to get a little mad at me. She was saying, "Ohhh..." in an irritated voice, and thought that I might be just playing and not serious. She kept trying for a while, but finally gave up and said that she would have to tell me when I got older. I understood perfectly well what she meant, though. I was just being difficult.

I'm sure, though, that she had been telling me Bible stories for years, so I had had a significant amount of exposure to the subject already.

Crackers and butter

When I was very little, I used to really like saltine crackers with butter between them. It wasn't actually butter, it was margarine, but we called it butter. I remember one time I ate an enormous number of them, so much that my mother started worrying about me getting sick from it. I also tried eating the margarine plain, since it tasted so good with the crackers, but surprisingly it didn't taste good by itself. I had trouble understanding why, but I had to accept it.

I don't know what brand margarine we used back then. Now, we mostly use Blue Bonnet, but we also used Parkay and Shedd's Spread for a while. For a little while I tried using one of those brands that were supposed to be good for you, but even though it was in a tub it was very hard and tore the bread up when I tried to spread it. It was expensive for margarine, too.

My mother says that in the old days margarine used to be white and came with a powder that you had to mix with it to give it some color.

Perfume

My mother's sister, my aunt, wears perfume. When I was very little, I thought it smelled very harsh and almost overpowering. I could hardly breathe, or hardly stand to breathe, when she was near.

I mentioned the problem to my mother, but she didn't see anything wrong with how it smelled. She thought it might be because I smelled things differently when I was little, and would change as I grew older.

As the years passed, the smell grew less harsh and more bearable. Finally, the harshness was gone entirely and the scent of the perfume was sweet and much fainter.

I guess my mother was right.

Snakes

In the early to mid 1950s, we lived on my mother's parents' farm in Missouri. My mother said that sometimes an old farmhand named Charley used to show her snakes he had killed while mowing the yard. I think he thought that she would be more interested in the snakes than she actually was.

A few years after that, the menfolk helped my younger brother and me build a 'fort' with logs. It was in a field, and wasn't very tall, maybe three or four feet high, but was wide and long enough to have some room inside. The next year, we wanted to use it again, but it had tall grass around it and in it, and the adults were afraid of snakes being in it and wouldn't let us use it anymore.

My father used to say that he was chased by a snake called a blue racer. He didn't like snakes, perhaps because of that experience.

When I was little, I used to say that I had had three snake dreams. I think that in at least one or two of them, the dream was mostly about something else and the snake only appeared in a small part of it, perhaps towards the end. I don't remember much about the dreams now, though.

Dream - The cloud came down

Early in February of 2005 I had a strange dream. My mother was showing me some books and papers from a few decades ago, from when I was in the 7th or 8th grade. There was a book with a plain, dark blue cover, and it had a few extra pages at the beginning with a paragraph or two on them. Whoever added the pages seemed to be intending to speak directly to me. My mother found another copy of the book that didn't have the extra pages.

I also found a paper where some kind of board game had been drawn, apparently by me. Then I walked along over a small bridge in the dark, and turned around and walked back, going down through the dry river bed and then back up. As I neared the road again, there was a slight rise of dry ground, and in the light that shown from somewhere I saw that sections had been marked on the path, like heavy dotted lines drawn across it. I realized that I was living the board game. There were also instructions written on the path, things I was supposed to do if I stepped in particular areas. I saw a dinosaur, somewhat larger than a man, perhaps somewhat like Tyrannosaurus rex or maybe even Godzilla, come from the bushes on the left and then retreat backwards, as if showing what was supposed to happen if I stepped in a certain area. A man came from the right and then retreated, also. I pretty much ignored the writing on the path, deciding that I didn't have time to go through this. I moved quickly across the marked segments and onto the road, where I met someone else, but I don't remember who.

After a while I ended up at a book store. I spent a lot of time looking over some books there. They had a section where I found another copy of the old book. This one had some damage inside; the first few pages were crinkled and folded over along the edge, and appeared to have suffered water damage, because they were soft and not smooth anymore. Someone had carefully hand-printed in mixed upper and lower case a long message or statement on the first two or three pages.

In the middle upper-third of the first page a blank area had been left, with the words going around it on either side. In the middle of the blank area, an address label had been placed. The address label was silver with black lettering, and had my name and address on it.

There were other books there too, in that section, including tall, magazine-size paperbacks perhaps 3/4 of an inch thick, that appeared to be tutorials, as for math, etc. These books were also old, and appeared to be well thumbed through, with lots of grime along the edges.

I came back a little later and the shelves in that area were mostly bare, with the books (and some old magazines) dumped in boxes. It seems that they were getting rid of them; they were going to throw them away. I looked through some of it; it generally looked pretty ratty, but I wanted it anyway. If I actually bought them though, they still wanted full price even though they were in bad shape and were going to be thrown away. A man who worked there kept coming up to me and urging me to buy them, with a very earnest expression on his face. I hated to pay full price for old, damaged books that they were planning to throw away. I also didn't want to steal them, because that would be wrong, even if they were going to be thrown away shortly.

The dream changed to something else, and it seems that there was an intermediate part that I don't remember. I was in a strange house in the desert, though. It seemed to be in an isolated area, perhaps central or northern Nevada. The house was big, with big rooms and long windows facing the outside. The house was single story and seemed to be made of concrete, with a flat roof. I was there with my mother, talking to her.

As we walked, moving to a different part of the house, I looked out the windows and saw the outside. It was late in the day, and some strange clouds were in the sky. The clouds were dark, especially in a segmented arc that went across them. The clouds also had an orange tinge. I tried to get my mother to look at the clouds, telling her how bad they looked, but she seemed distracted and kept on talking. I was finally able to get her attention, though. The clouds started emitting a series of brilliant flashes, sometimes completely blinding and sometimes just partially so. It wasn't lightning, it was the cloud itself flashing. Particularly the dark segmented area that went in an arc.

Then the cloud turned a variety of colors and the whole cloud was formed of segments joined together, and was very close and low. As I kept looking from the cloud to my mother and back again, it seemed that almost each time I saw the cloud it was different. Now the segments had colored flags hanging from them, advertising different things. I tried to point this out to my mother, but it was hard to get her attention. When I looked back at the cloud, all the flags had fallen off except one red one with white letters, saying "Drink Coca-Cola", and it was hanging from one corner. Then it fell, too, and the color of the cloud was light gray with an orange tint again. The cloud material seemed to almost be boiling in place.

The cloud was very low now, and very, very close. The segments that formed the arc were roughly square-shaped, and now had other segments going back on radial lines, like I was seeing a portion of a disc. From where the middle of the disc would be, a column of cloud started pouring down. It was light gray with an orange tint, like the rest of it, and slowly spread out where it hit the ground. The cloud was moving toward me, taking the column with it. There was an uncovered concrete patio outside, with a long picnic table on it with one end facing me. I saw the cloud column start to move along the top of the picnic table, with the bottom of the column spreading out on the table top.

I was filled with a real urgency, that we had to get away somehow, that we had to hide, that it was coming for us. I could also hear a Navy plane going by very low, and maybe caught a glimpse of it, and heard it crash somewhere nearby. I tried to tell my mother that we had to get away from the cloud, that we had to hide from it, that we had to stop it from getting us, and she finally realized what I was saying.

We started going deeper into the house, with me leading the way, going to the left, down a broad hallway. As we went, the path was slightly downward, because the rooms became partially recessed into the ground. My mother stopped at a place in the hallway where a type of cupboard was. It had a large, painted, plywood door on its side, opening upwards, set a few feet up in the wall. My mother climbed onto the long shelf behind it, and lay partly curled up on her side. The door didn't want to quite close all the way, because her knees and elbows were sticking out. I tried to convince her that that might not be the best place, but she wanted to stay there.

I moved on and looked into a large room that had a long row of windows facing the outside. That wasn't hidden enough, so I looked in the next room, which was at the end of the building at one side. It was dark, and was sunken several feet into the ground and was completely lined with tall heavy bookcases filled with books. I knew that it had a long row of windows high in the wall, but they were completely covered by the bookcases. I thought that it might be a good place to hide in, but I also worried that if the cloud came, I wouldn't be able to escape, since there was only one way out.

I was also worried about the front entrance to the house. Was it locked? It seemed that it might not be. Was it even shut securely? I had a picture in my mind of the two glass doors, with one of them slightly ajar.

I looked back toward the front, up the broad, sloping hallway, and saw a slight orange haze in the air. And there was the pilot from the plane, standing at the other end of the house. He threw a toy football at me. I caught it, and it had a rubber-like surface, not very tightly inflated. It had seams, or what were intended to be seams, running from back to front and another around the middle. Each segment formed by the seams was of a different color. One was white, one was dark blue, another was a dark gray-green, I think one was black, and there were other colors, too. I looked to throw it back to him, but he was gone. There was just the darkness and the haze.

I threw it anyway, toward a corner where I thought that he might be, but somehow I had it back again. I started to move forward, to look for him.

All of a sudden he was there, stepping into a doorway right beside me. I was really startled, and somewhat scared. He stood there, leaning forward slightly, with a malicious grin on his face. He had a lot of soot on him, and he had something dark smeared around his eyes, which were too large and far too pale. His face was slightly roundish, and he looked like he might be partly Hispanic. He was wearing a green uniform with straps around the legs, wrapping the material to him so that it was almost form-fitting. He had straps crossing his chest, too, but I think they were really too small to be ammo belts.

I tried desperately to get him to call the base, to tell them of our situation. He didn't seem to care that much about it, and was sarcastic and basically acting like a wiseguy. I finally got him to use a very large, blocky, black phone that was hanging on the wall. It had an old-fashioned dial on it, the kind with a ring of holes that you put a finger in and turn, except that it was huge and had extra holes so you could stick several fingers in at once.

He finally took the receiver off, put it to his head and stuck his fingers in the dial and started turning it. However, he started talking immediately, like it was a direct connection. His fingers turned the dial while he was talking, and a loud clicking, ratcheting sound filled the air, along with a loud phone-ringing sound that varied in intensity and timing. He talked loudly, I think maybe in almost a sing-song voice, acting like it really didn't matter.

I saw in my mind's eye a person on the other end with a headset, sitting and listening. He was wearing a light-colored military uniform, with at least one person on each side of him. The other people were perhaps standing. The person taking the call was frowning and trying to make sense of what was being said. He kept saying "What?" or something similar. The Navy pilot, or whatever he was, wasn't really making any sense, and I could tell that he wasn't really concerned about making any sense either, that it was deliberate.

And the dream ends there.

Well, here we are

Well, here we are. Or, rather, here I am. This is the start of the blog, the first post. I intend to post various things here, on a variety of subjects, some personal and some not. Some of the subjects are things that have happened to me, some dreams I have had, books and movies, and thoughts on various things like the paranormal, possible unknown animals, UFOs, spiritual matters, physics, and maybe a little news and politics and other items.