a vivid reassuring dream

This is one more in a series of what I am calling my reassuring dreams.

Here's what lead up to the dream. I woke up at around five in the morning on March 25th. I was wide awake, just lying there in bed and wasn't sure if I could fall back asleep. I opened my laptop which was nearby and found a podcast that I had wanted to listen to, it had been posted online just a few days earlier (Starborn Support Radio, March 23rd, 2014, highly recommended).

This is normal for me, to listen to audio from my computer at night. It was an interview with Chad and Alta Dillard, a husband and wife who have both had extensive UFO abduction experiences and all of the high strangeness that comes with those events. I've spoken at length with Alta, but that was a few years ago. I lay in bed listening.

I was soon asleep, and the interview was still playing. I started dreaming, and the voices of Chad and Alta were overlaid as a sort of soundtrack to my dream.

In the dream I was lying flat on my back on my bathroom floor, it was almost as if I was hiding there, but at the same time I felt very comfortable. I had the thought that the floor was great, and I should get a firmer mattress. I suddenly felt this full body sensation, it was a kind of shimmering vibration as if I was fading away, and I thought: "I'm going to be taken!" There was a very real knowing that this was the start of an alien abduction event. It felt as if my molecules were beginning to dissolve and this feeling was very familiar.

 read more below 

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hyper-vivid distorted consciousness

Hyper-vivid memory from 1993

In January or February of 1993 I awoke from a sound sleep and looked out my bedroom window to see five spindly gray aliens walking towards my house. This sighting lasted, maybe, less than 20 seconds.

This happened over twenty years ago. Since then I’ve written about this, drawn pictures and wrestled with the implications. I did a long post where I tried to honestly express the strangeness this memory. At the core of this experience was a very real change in normal perceptions, a kind of distorted consciousness. I try to describe this odd feeling in detail when I initially wrote about the overall experience (linked HERE).

It felt dreamlike, but it was different than any other dream I’ve ever had. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote:

This memory is strangely vivid in a way that seems entirely different form a normal state of mind... weirdly quiet - sort of a pressurized fish bowl - the deepest part of my psyche is displaced and moved to the forefront - the normal thought chatter in my head is turned off - maybe - kinda - sorta...

A distinct warping of my psyche, whatever that means... because this strangely vivid state of mind was so weird, I do not fully trust this memory.

This distorted feeling has a flavor that is absolutely distinct. Attempting to describe it in words would only hint at the sensations. All I can say is that what I felt was unmistakably unique. I have made a very real effort to ask other UFO abductees if they have ever experienced this altered state of consciousness. I've had conversations where we describe what I feel is the same exact distorted sensation.

I’ve had three other experiences that seem to indicate to me that what happened in 1993 wasn’t a dream.

One event took place in January of 2001. Again, I had this exact same feeling while waking up under extremely bizarre circumstances. The story is complex and it was written up a long and detailed post (linked HERE).

A funny dream with a little UFO

Another example took place in the summer of 2008, the same feeling manifested itself within a dream. This is actually a funny little story and it fits neatly into a little subcategory I’ve been calling my reassuring dreams. I went through a phase where I would have very vivid dreams where a lesson or example would be conveyed within the dream narrative.

This dream has me interacting with a small flying saucer and as I moved closer I could feel the sensation of the oddly distorted reality. I could control it by moving in close and backing away. Again, this feeling was exactly the same as what I experienced in 1993. I posted and illustrated my memories (linked HERE).

a hyper-vivid experience inside a tent near Dolores Colorado

Finally, I felt this sensation again while floating up out of the tent during an event in 2010. Of all my odd experiences this one seems to scream UFO abduction. I wrote about this (and all it’s associated synchro-weirdness) in a series of posts with illustrations (linked HERE).

So, I’ve had four very distinct experiences with this odd sensation, each connected to something very strange. After the event seeing the aliens out my window in 1993 I just dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a weird dream. It did feel dreamlike and denying the implications seems understandable given my life at that point. But since then I’ve had three other experiences where I felt that same distinctive feeling making that outright denial almost impossible.

At this point, 20 years later, I’m at a point where I must conclude that the event in 1993 really happened and it wasn’t just a dream. I say this not because of my very clear memories of that night, but because of the follow up experiences.

This has been a pattern for me. I will deny the implications of a defining event, but later come to accept it’s reality because of a series of intertwined experiences. These seem to come in the form of synchronicities, psychic flashes, vivid dreams, lines on maps or owl interactions. My sense is that the universe is showing me something, and if I don’t acknowledge the significance there is a follow up bunch of weird experiences that force me to reexamine the deeper meaning.

(a little bit more)

I have never written about this one tiny aspect of the 1993 event because it was so hard to justify. The way I initially explained the distorted feeling came almost as a reflexive response. Here’s what I told myself:

You know that feeling when you are a little kid driving in the car with your parents and you fall asleep and then wake up where you didn’t expect to be? That’s what this felt like.

That description seems to feel close. I am picturing myself as a little boy falling asleep with my forehead against the car window while on a long drive with my parents. The steady droning of the car will induce a sort of vivid dream-state where I could visualize looking out the window at the passing scenery, but if I opened my eyes the view wouldn’t match what I was dreaming. Now, this might easily reinforce that it was nothing more than a dream. But, the more mysterious implication is that waking up in a car where you don’t expect to be has the distinct flavor of a missing time event.

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reassuring dreams, two nights in a row

For a while I was keeping a sort of diary of my experiences, I would just sort of dump them into a document on my computer. This document is now 111 pages long. I haven’t added anything in a long time, but I remembered about two dreams that seemed curious, and I searched them out. Here’s what I wrote: 

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June 5th 2008

I am in Alaska working for an outdoor school. I just got done teaching a mountaineering course, and now I am at the base camp, a lovely farm north of Anchorage. I sleep in a little wall tent off in the woods near the farm. There is no nighttime, it's always daylight this time of year. 

I have had two weirdly vivid dreams, two nights in a row. 

The first was a full-blow abduction dream. Interior of an alien craft, a cold table, telepathy, weird alien hybrids (they looked like tiny shrunken old men) and people (yup, normal people) on the craft too. 

The exact details are extremely foggy, but the overwhelming impression was a sort of relief. There was NOTHING scary about this dream. The alien hybrids were small and nonthreatening. The people on-board seemed to have a purpose and a job, and it was somehow for the collective good. 

And the little aliens seemed so normal, I wasn't intimidated in the least. I literally thought to myself, "This is them? Why am I afraid of these dinky little things?" 

And, the most vivid memory from this dream was the telepathy and how it sounded in my own head. It was EXTREMELY clear and free of any "static." I was impressed, I thought: "Wow, this is working super well, there's no need to worry about communicating, because it's SO clear." 

The next morning I tried hard to remember what was told to me during the finely tuned telepathy, but I couldn't remember. 

Now, lemme say, this was a dream. Not some foggy memory of anything real. But I woke up feeling relived and at peace. There was something deeply reassuring about this dream, I was confronted with something that should have been scary, but it wasn’t, instead it just felt so normal. 

And then the following nights dream: 

This was filled with very moody and frightening images. Huge air-force jets chasing things in the sky, and people on the ground (myself included) watching helplessly. Eventually there was a terrifying nuclear explosion on the distant horizon, then bunches of them. I took shelter in a sort of children's puppet theater. And there was a reoccurring image of a boy "emerging" from a stage prop over and over. 

How do I interpreter this? The overtly theatrical ending, literally on a stage makes me wonder. And the weird repeating emergence of a little boy out of an obvious stage prop. It was a sort of jack-in-the-box thing, and the claustrophobic little stage reminded me of that theater in Disneyland with the mechanical Lincoln.

Anyway - both dreams were JUST dreams, and they were extremely vivid, colorful, cinematic and weirdly 3D. 

This weird imagery in both of these dreams is probably nothing - I want to convince myself of this - these are JUST dreams. It's probably nothing but my poor tortured psyche dealing with the 24 hour sunlight. But it feels weirder than that.

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These are what I’ve been calling reassuring dreams, and I went through a period where I was having a bunch of them. And by reassuring, I mean the dream has a scary element of the UFO abduction phenomenon, but it isn’t scary at all. What I experience in the dream is sort of bland and normal. I've created a label for these dreams, click HERE for all of them.

Here's a good example of a (funny) reassuring dream.

There is a follow-up post below, another reassuring dream report, and this one seems even stranger.

All these reassuring dreams feel like a sort of projection from outside of myself. They FEEL like an implanted dream experience that is meant to calm me down - to REASSURE me. I haven't had an experience like this in a few years, these dreams all seemed to cluster around that summer. I think I know what I am implying. I have no other way to describe these dreams other than the way it feels.

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Please note: 

The excerpt above has been edited slightly from the form I found it in the diary. I cleaned up some grammatical stuff and added a few extra sentences for clarity.

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a forgotten reassuring dream

In the summer of 2008 Dr. Leo Sprinkle called me and said I should contact a woman who lived near me, he said she had some interesting experiences. The next call I made was to this woman, who I’ll call Tracy (a pseudonym). After hearing some of her story we both decided that I should drive to her home so I could play the role of investigator and sketch artist. She and her husband lived over three hours dive from my home, so she invited me to spend the night in their guest cabin.

When I got to her house we spent the afternoon talking about her experiences. She had a fascinating set of vivid sightings and events that seemed to indicate a lifetime of contact with the UFO phenomenon.

I took notes and I did a sketch of a craft with her guidance. I'll often admit that I am a crummy investigator, because all I ever seem to do is have a heart to heart conversation with a witness. I am NOT objective in the slightest, I get all emotionally wrapped up in their stories. I liked Tracy, and I thought she had a great outlook. I never did anything with the sketches or my notes.

Here's where it gets strange, I found something in my dairy. I do NOT remember ever writing this. I found it when I was digging through some old notes for the post above about two dreams in Alaska. This is another reassuring dream. I think I typed this into my lap-top computer the morning I woke up in Tracy's guest cabin.

July 14th 2008 

I had a dream last night at Tracy’s house. 

I remember I had a clear vision of several gray aliens. I was NOT subjected to any kind of fear. I was instead coming to terms with a sort of “normal” feeling, like they weren't so bad. Seeing them wasn’t out of the ordinary. It left me with the distinct impression that this was extremely calming, and in a way, reassuring. 

I do NOT think there was any kind of abduction experience. Just a dream. But it fits the pattern of the two dreams in Alaska. Extremely vivid, and strangely orchestrated to be reassuring.

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audio describing the vivid lampshade dream (Laughlin 5)

Right after I had the weirdly vivid dream (from the previous post) I documented my immediate impressions into a small digital voice recorder. I'm sharing that audio, along with a little bit extra where I try and clarify some of the details.

I have no idea why this dream seems so significant.

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audio download / recorded March 5th 2010 / 14 minutes long

vivid dream and blue orb (Laughlin 4)

Glowing orange dream imagery in a pine forest at night. Click on any of these illustrations for a HI-rez close-up view.

I had a weirdly vivid dream on the night of Feb 16th. The next morning I was going to start the long drive to Laughlin Nevada for the annual UFO conference. My sleep was restless, and I had my lap top near my bed, and I listened to an audio podcast to occupy my time. Shortly after starting the podcast, I ended up asleep.

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This post has an accompanying audio file

audio download / recorded March 5th 2010 / 14 minutes long

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The dream began in a nighttime environment, and I an standing in a gravel parking lot (or gravel road) in a very distinct forest. The pine trees are evenly spaced, and there are no branches down low. The forest floor is flat without any undergrowth. I looked to my left to see a very weird orange light shining through the trees. I moved a little to get a better view, and I see that it was a simple lampshade set on the ground (or, maybe floating a few inches off the ground) and it's giving off a vibrant orange glow. Instantly, I had the thought that this was NOT a lampshade, it was some sort of hallucination, and something else was there.

Even in my dream state I clearly think about an event in a book by Dr. Karla Turner titled: INTO THE FRINGE. There was a creepy scene in that book where a witness describes seeing a “satellite dish” in his yard, but he knows it’s NOT a satellite dish, something else was there.

I look at the lampshade for just a few seconds, and then I find myself floating up off the forest floor. I rise up slow and smooth, and I think to myself: “Oh, this again.” My perception is that the experience is quite familiar, and actually very pleasant. This comforting feeling fits a pattern of what I call my reassuring dreams.

Floating above a black shape.

Soon I am levitating above the tall trees, and I am looking down into the pine forest. My floating body is positioned with a slight tilt forward, so I am sort of forced to look downward. Below me is a huge round circle, inky black against the pale orange glow in among the trees. I am above something, that I perceive to be a large saucer shaped craft, and I smoothly descend downward into the center of the circle.

Floating downward in a weirdly vibrant tube full of colorful symbols

The next thing I realize is that I am floating in a shiny glowing blue tube, slowly descending. The walls of this tube is covered with a collection of brightly colored puzzle pieces, and these are inlaid into the wall. Each of these shapes look like some sort of Egyptian hieroglyph, they seem to be made of candy colored plastic and they are back lit in a sort of frame. I’m reminded of a brightly colored child’s toy.

I'm compelled to pick out one distinct shape

I reach forward and pick out one puzzle piece, it’s as if I am drawn to this one shape. I hold it in my hand and examine it closely, it is shaped like a stylized “W” and I’m filled with an intense compulsion to remember it, and I focused on the outline of the shape. (more about this here!)

I continue down into the tube, and then I’m walking around in a series of blue rooms crowded with people. The rest of the dream is a little bit frenetic in it’s imagery.

The dream seems to culminate with a meeting of some sort in a daylight street scene . I'm in among a crowd of people, and there is a discussion by a small team. They are carefully explaining that everything is alright, and that there will soon be a wonderful event where UFO occupants will join us here on earth. It sounds logical and nice, but it seems a little too perfect. I approach the woman sharing the story, and tell her that I don’t believe her, that my intuition senses some sort of deception. Suddenly her eyes get big and black, and the same happens with her teammates, and she stares at me in a very threatening way. She warns me NOT to tell anyone about my feelings.

Then I wake up.

The podcast is still playing on my laptop, and I was surprised that so little time had passed given the length and complexity of my dream. I was probably asleep for less than a half hour

The dream was so intensely vivid that I did something that surprises me as I type this. I got out of bed, went downstairs and found a little digital voice recorder, and carried it back up to my bed. I lay there, under the covers, and recorded the dream as best as I could. (audio from this recording posted here)

After, describing the weird narrative, I stopped the recorder and turned off the light. In the dark I saw a small blue orb, about the size of a grapefruit floating, centered in the ceiling above my bed. I could see it for probably less than 20 seconds, and then it was gone. It disappeared quickly and smoothly. Right after it faded away, I rolled over and promptly went to sleep, an unusual reaction to seeing something so strange.

The orb was a soft focus sphere, not the flat looking image that show up on digital flash photos. It was three dimensional and glowing softly. It gave off light, but it didn't seem to light up the ceiling the way, say, a glow stick might. Could it have been something in my retina from my bedside light? Maybe, but I've slept in that room for over 16 years and I've never seen anything like that before. In the follow up to the experience, I tried to recreate the experience by looking into lights in the room (including the tiny red light on the voice recorder) and then shut the lights off, these attempts didn't come close to what I saw that night. 

This orb image is from a the homepage of a person I met during the final hours of the Laughlin conference. Her name is Jill and she is a channel. I found it on her web page, minutes after posting this essay.

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NOTE: This post has an accompanying audio file, found HERE.

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funny dream

Double click on the illustration for a hi-rez view.

During the summer of 2008 I was at the receiving end of a series of oddly vivid dreams. I call them “reassuring” dreams because in each one I confront certain frightening UFO issues. In these dreams the scary things are presented to me as something simple and non-threatening. I’m not sure what to make of these dreams.

One of these curious “reassuring” dreams had the distinct air of comedy. It happened last summer while I was sleeping in a tent in the mountains of central Wyoming.

Please note, this NEVER happened, it was a dream!

In this dream, I was visiting my older brother in Michigan. We were together in his kitchen and he off-handedly told me that he had something that he thought I would find interesting. Then, he took me to the garage and showed me what he had, it was a flying saucer! It was about the size of a van, up on saw-horses and partially covered with a tarp. It looked like someone had started disassembling the thing because two big sections had been removed from the sides.

I was completely mystified.

My brother calmly explained he done some sort of government work, and knew some guy who ended up with this thing, and he didn’t want it anymore so my brother took it off his hands as a sort of favor. Anyway, it was funny how casual he was about it.

Here’s the weird part. He explained that if I got too close it would distort my perceptions, and - well - alter reality. I didn’t quite get what he meant. So, I approached it and as I got closer there was a distinct warping of my psyche. This eerie feeling would be hard to explain, but it was very defined. The feeling was unmistakably vivid.

And here’s the bizarre part, that warped sensation was familiar, it seemed to exactly match my memory of the events from Maine in 1993, and the dream like fog I experienced.

As I backed away, the feeling subsided, when I got closer it happened again.

My brother was totally cavalier about the whole thing. He said he was used to that weird feeling, no big deal. But he can’t figure out how to get inside the thing, that sensation holds him back. Then he showed me how he attached a camera on the end of a long stick and puts that in the door to see what was inside.

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The way I saw the craft was as a disassembled disc, with the sides removed. This drawing shows how I perceived the assembled craft.


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neuron-like nature of the internet

I experienced a tiny little dose of the divine in a coffee shop in Moab Utah.

The other night I slept out in the desert under the stars. I was a few miles outside of Moab along a lovely stretch of high-way that runs parallel to the Colorado River.

Sometimes when I sleep outside I'll experience the most vivid dreams, and recently I've tried to encourage some extra message from the great beyond as I sleep. So, as I zipped up my sleeping bag below the sandstone cliffs, I asked the universe to give me an insight, I was receptive. Alas, I woke up without any dreams.

Later that morning, I drove back into town for coffee, and I pull out my laptop. I wanted to look up MOAB for any mythic significance, so I go to Wikipedia, a resource I rarely use. I log on and the featured article of the day on was about high-way 128 in Utah, where I slept the night before.

That was odd...

Now, this coincidence is curious, true enough. It obviously made me take note. In the previous days I had been composing a blog-post in my head about on the neuron-like nature of the internet and the possibility that it might be developing it’s own self awareness. And then I get a very curious cyber-synchronicity linked to where I slept, and where I asked for an insight.

Are we witnessing the internet form a new kind of collective consciousness? There is now a global expanse of electronic brain neurons running everywhere, in the air, into space and into the psyche of individuals. It's all emerging from an unfamiliar digital zeitgeist.

Is there an evolving giant life form of synaptic fibers emerging within cyberspace? Is it a new set of neurotransmitters, allowing and encouraging an alternative web of synchronistic happenings?

I recently tried (and succeeded) to poach a wireless signal at a friends apartment in Brooklyn. I was amazed to see a ridiculously long list of available internet connections, it was bizarre.

This is a new chapter of human history, nothing like this has EVER happened before. We are surrounded by a swirling electo-magnetic soup, with wi-fi portals, cell-phone towers and satellites in space. I am somehow forced to imagine billions of devout monks all chanting together, resonating collectively.

What is unfolding?

There is a perceivable significance in a shuffled deck of Tarot cards. And the I Ching is regarded as a system of divination within a random set of set of 64 abstract line arrangements.

Why is the internet any different?

Here’s a little bit more:

Below is an excerpt from PARANORMAL MUSINGS:
This is no joke. Today Ian and I went to Forrest Lawn Cemetery to pay our respects to Forry Ackerman, who died Dec. 4.

Next we ... arrived at our hotel. When I sat down and logged into the computer, Facebook required the typical security typographical entry before letting me see my mail. To my total astonishment, the words I was prompted to type were, "Ackerman 000" I kid you not.

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Text added Sept.  2nd 2012

Just so y'know, highway 128 shows up again in a very curious set of events, described in this post HERE. The experiences described by 'Artimesia' happened just a few miles from where I slept in the post above.

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reassuring dreams

My weird journey has brought me face to face with a lot of people who declare themselves to be psychic, intuitive or at a higher spiritual vibration. I’m deeply skeptical of these claims, but if it’s true, I might as well chat with them. They will all ask me what I do. Do I meditate, do I pray, do I use a Ouija board?

I don’t do any of that. I sleep under the stars.

Here’s what seems to work for me. I walk into the mountains alone with a dinky backpack holding just the bare essentials. I live in a beautiful place, so this is convenient. I check the weather before I go (this means looking to see if there are any clouds in the south) because I don’t want to be bothered with a tent.

I hike until it’s dark, set out a little pad and then lay myself down to sleep. The proper term is "open bivouac" but the accepted slang is astro-bivy.

If I'm inspired, I'll go thru a simple request. I'll ask, out-loud, "Okay universe, if you want to tell me anything that could help our troubled world. Or, if there is a lesson I need, please let me know. I'm receptive."

And then I fall asleep.

The results have positively bizarre. I will have the most weirdly vivid dreams. Some of them are richly mythic, with heavy-handed metaphors. But most of the time, they are curiously reassuring. So much so, that I call these my reassuring dreams.

I don’t know what it is about me, but my sychronicities have (for the most part) been playful and - well - sometimes downright silly. Why it’s unfolding for me like this, I have no idea. Maybe because I’m a cartoonist, it’s manifesting - well - sort of cartoony.

I've met a lot of people who claim the the UFO abduction phenomenon, and when I tell them I sleep outside alone they say, "I could NEVER do that." For me, it's just the opposite, I am deeply content alone in the mountains. I love sleeping under the stars.

(more vivid and reassuring dreams to come)

vivid dream

During the summer, I sleep outside a lot. I make a real-deal effort to spend a LOT of time camping in the mountains. If I can sleep under the stars, I'm happiest.

Sometimes if I'm inspired, I'll go through a simple request. As I lay down at night, I'll ask, out-loud, "Okay universe, if you wanna tell me anything that could help our troubled world, please let me know. I'm receptive."

And then I go to sleep. I did this last summer, and here's what I got.

The dream I received was amazingly overtly visual and wildly exaggerated. I was alone on an enormous metal roof, literally miles wide. The angle was shallow enough to walk around on, but still it plenty steep to be really scary. I looked up above me on the roof to see a huge canvas tarp tied off with ropes. When I say huge, I mean it, again - literally miles wide.

Behind the tarp was a chaotic conglomeration of all the world armaments, tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers - piled together in a massive jumble. Everything was crammed tightly behind this tarp. And the tarp was old, stained and rotten. The failing tarp as inadequately jury-rigged on the metal roof. This massive pile of weaponry looked so tenuous, it was obvious just a hair's breath away from failing and sliding down the roof.

I walked down to the edge of the roof, and the precipice was mind blowing.

I've spent a lot of time in places like Yosemite, so I know what it's like to stand at the edge of a huge cliff. But the edge of this roof was altogether more expansive and awe-inspiring - and down-right scary.

I'll add that the world below was a haunting vision of natural beauty, lush wet jungles and waterfalls.

Then I wake up. This was not a normal dream, it was something much more vivid.

Okay, I don't need a doctorate in comparative mythology to interpret that dream. The imagery was blatant and unconcealed. But - I mean, is it news that the world is on a precipice with looming military disaster threatening to ruin the natural world? It's not like I was given some secret knowledge. I already knew this, and (I hope) so does any thinking citizen of this planet.

I've had overtly weird experiences (see the rest of this blog) that point to some sort of unknown contact. And, I truly feel that these vivid dreams are part of the same phenomenon. This is somehow intertwined.

What am I supposed to DO with these not-so-subtle experiences? Am I over analyzing this?

(more vivid dreams to come)