Early Complications Regarding Sleep and Gravity

When I was very young – my best guess puts me between 5 and 8 years old – there were two events I remember centered around sleep, or at least the bed and my attempts at sleep.

I can’t say why these experiences didn’t occur to me earlier. They’ve not exactly been lost to memory, but at the same time I’d not recalled them readily either, not in connection with these – what I’m referring to as numinous – phenomena. They certainly qualify. In fact, I’ve always thought of them as relating in some very general way to the UFO experience, as it presents itself in my life. Yet these remain as isolated events, without inherent reference to anything but themselves, and were not precursors to, nor as far as I’m aware did they follow upon, anything. I’ve thought of them in this connection because of their peculiar flavor, a kind of sense at the back of my head that I get when I contemplate events of this nature. This has as yet been the ultimate litmus test for those episodes that I’ve detailed in this site, this beguiling synesthesia that leaves me with the feeling I’ve come up against something “alien” or other.

In the first memory, I’m in my bed, but I’m not asleep. It’s very early in the morning, and I’ve only just woken up. It was probably what woke me; if I wasn’t up already, this would’ve done it. I remember the foot-end of the bed picking up and dropping, over and over again rapidly, an oscillation running through the bed frame’s foot end only, like someone had taken it up by a few inches and shook it hard and really fast. But there was nobody else in the room with me. Neither had there been an earthquake, though these do happen sometimes in the region – in the Seattle area and its surrounding suburbs. No one in my home or in school that day said anything about an earthquake though, and it would’ve been all the talk, and it had distinctly been only the foot-end of the bed that shook like this, not the head, not throughout. No one but me, it seemed, had experienced anything. I don’t recall what happened, if anything, after that, though it seems this shaking may have occurred over more than one night. I don’t so clearly remember. For all the racket this must have caused, there was no response from my parents or my older sister, who were also in the house – my sister in the room below mine. I recall the slight, staccato impact, the sound, however restrained, of the bed’s footpegs hammering the floor, though gently, and so quick – more a vibration than a pounding.

The other, similar event came later. I woke up suddenly from a dream – it was almost certainly a dream of falling – to find myself above the mattress by a foot or more and plummeting back towards it. My face slammed into the pillow a split second later and my whole body bounced, suddenly wide awake and utterly perplexed. Flying dreams would later be a common theme for me, but seemed the coda to a similar dream, one of falling from a height, one too seamlessly spliced into my waking life.