looking out my window at night

Drawn from memory. Click on the picture for a high resolution image.

I am attempting to recount a very short memory. The incident described in this post lasted, maybe, less than 20 seconds. The implications of this event has been difficult for me to integrate into my life. I’ve been terribly conflicted about the truth of this foggy incident. It could have been a dream, true enough. I cannot allow myself to discount that.

In January or February of 1993, I was living alone in a small house in rural Maine. I had been dealing with a hard break up, and I was in an fragile emotional state, and this is an important factor in this story.

The driveway of the house had one of those motion sensitive lights, and it was pretty common for the light to come on when a car drove by or a deer walked through the front yard at night. The bedroom window faced the driveway, and my bed was up against that window.

I was depressed during that chapter of my life, and sleeping poorly. But I woke up that night because a very bright light was shining in through the window above the bed. I sat up, propping myself up on my elbow, and looked out the window. I saw five spindly entities with skinny bodies and big black eyes. They were on the lawn walking toward the house. They were back-lit by a singular round bright shape. This light seemed oddly small.

My first drawing, done as a way to get my thoughts down on paper, and then hidden away in a drawer.

My response to this frightening image was to nonchalantly lay my head down on the pillow and promptly fall back asleep.

Shouldn't I have jumped out of bed screaming in terror? But instead I felt absolutely empty of emotion. It was almost as if I was somehow controlled. I calmly thought to myself, "Oh yes, they're here, let's just shut down and black out."

The illustration (above) seems to capture the memory as close as I possible.

Now, it’s important that I add this extra information. This memory is strangely vivid in a way that seems entirely different form a normal state of mind.

I saw something, but at the same time I truly do NOT think it happened in “this” reality. That may sound hard to grasp, but it is the only way I can honestly depict the experience.

It’s important to me that I try to describe this feeling.

Hmmm - how to use words - weirdly quiet - sort of a pressurized fish bowl - the deepest part of my psyche is displaced, and moved to the forefront - maybe the normal thought chatter in my head is turned off - maybe - kinda - sorta...

A distinct warping of my psyche, whatever that means.

This strange warped feeling shows up again a few years later as a key element in a funny dream involving a UFO.

Did it happen while sleeping, and I simply imagined everything? Was it just some sort of dream state? Maybe. That would be an easy way to sum it all up. I’ll add that, because of this strangely vivid state of mind was so weird, I do not fully trust this memory.

The next morning I had the image seared into my mind, and I could NOT imagine something so weird could be true. I simply dismissed it as some sort of dream. I will add that I don’t recall ever dreaming I was in my own bed. My dream imagery will always be somewhere else, never in surroundings that are exactly like my bedroom.

Could my fragile emotional state been a factor in this vivid image out my window? Was I simply so depressed that I created this scary delusion in my weakened mental condition? That night, was I somehow more susceptible to such a weird hallucination? Maybe.

This memory has a series of follow up stories. And each one is, for me, quite perplexing. I will continue to post more about this very curious event.

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I try and articulate the process of doing two drawings of this event in this follow up post.

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Text added Oct 31, 2009

The night of this event I was reading Budd Hopkin's book INTRUDERS. It was right there on the bed, probably just inches from my pillow. This might subtract from the potential reality of the experience. I mean, this book is filled with scary descriptions of skinny gray aliens, and my fragile mind was obviously filled with that imagery as I fell asleep. Did these vivid images well up as some hypnogogic dream? I have no idea.

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Text added March 25th 2010

This is something that feels funny to try and articulate, and I didn’t add it when I posted this thing a little over a year ago.

I remember looking out my window, and looking past the five skinny beings, and being drawn to look at that light out in the small open field surrounded by tall trees along side my driveway.

I thought the light was unusually small, maybe the size of refrigerator. The bright light in the yard looked, to me, just like a movie light mounted on a very short stand, pointed right at me, and into my window.

I've drawn it (above) to match my memory. 

Now, here's where it gets weird. This matches a scene from the feature film COMMUNION, based on Whitley Streiber's book. There was a lot movie that bothered me, BUT, there was a scene where the actor Christopher Walken (playing Whitley) walks toward a bright light in a forest setting.

approx. 1:30:20 time count in the movie COMMUNION

In the film, it is supposed to be an alien craft, but if you look carefully, you can see it's just a big movie light pointed at the camera. When I saw this during the movie, I thought to myself: "Oh, that's a simple way to create this special effect."

I saw the movie sometime in the summer of 1992, and “seeing” the light out my window would have been early in 1993.

When I saw the bright light from my bed out the window, I literally saw that same kind of movie light, just like in the film, and I remember thinking, in those few seconds: "Oh, that's a simple way to create this special effect." I had a similar reaction when I saw the movie. I simply dismissed this as perfectly normal. There was nothing at all unusual about a movie light in my yard in the middle of the night, but at the same time - it was very odd.

Where do I go with this?

Is this just proof that it was nothing more than a dream? Or, did "they" somehow create a screen memory? It seems like “they”quickly scanned my brain, picked a screen image from the files in my memory banks, and implanted the image of the movie light. Okay, just typing that previous sentence was hard, what I wrote is a big leap, but it feels accurate.

Am I using this "movie light" image to reinforce my own belief that nothing happened, and it was just a dream. Or, is the overt sense of a screen memory telling me that something very strange actually happened?

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Here’s an email excerpt from Mac Tonnies:

“Sure, your recollections aren't as inexplicable or dramatic as some, but you've never claimed that they were. (I think I mentioned this in a comment on my blog, but I tend to think the episode with the five Grays really *was* a sort of waking dream, as I've experienced similar phenomena myself). But the point is that you're not making unsubstantiated claims and that your take on the UFO counterculture is articulate and worth hearing, even if one happens to disagree with it.”

I agree with Mac on some level, I think this didn’t literally happen, but I simply don’t know. That said, 18 years later, the memory still haunts me.

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Text added Oct. 2nd 2013
Presently, I feel that this event truly happened. I came to this conclusion because of that sensation I tried to describe in the essay above. I say this after some serious self examination of my own memories. That altered reality feeling has happened tome several more times, and each time it was very much part of a UFO memory. I wrote about these other experiences and how I reluctantly came to this conclusion, liked in a post titled Hyper-vivid Distorted Consciousness.

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