An Account Of My Personal Experiences
The Hellier piece I’m working on is taking a little longer than I expected due to a few strange things coming up that, in retrospect, I probably should have anticipated. These weird occurrences have forced me to reflect upon some of the spooky things that happened during my childhood. So, if you’re interested, I thought my first ‘proper’ blog post could be an account of the experiences I have had throughout my life.
The Things I Don’t Remember
My Aunt is convinced that I was psychic as I child. I would like to state that I personally don’t believe that I was any more psychic than any other child; I was just fortunate enough to have a family who, despite not all sharing the same opinions on the paranormal, never accused me of making anything up for attention, and all of whom never considered my stories to be concerning or strange.
Calling my family members as research for this article has yielded the information that as a child I would want to go to bed immediately after my tea because I wanted to play with my ‘friends’. My earliest ‘friend’ was a ‘lady in the light’. I described her as an almost angelic being who would appear to me surrounded by an aura of light. I don’t remember much about her myself; I think I can remember the light but it’s hard to tell if that’s my memories or simply implanted memories from the stories I’ve been told. I’ve also just been told, today, that apparently I would see ‘tiny people’ running around on my bedroom floor and could occasionally be heard interacting with them. Once again, I don’t have memories of this exactly as I’ve been told; however, I do have one similar memory from when I was about six years old. I vividly remember playing in a tent made from bedsheets in my room and seeing a tiny humanoid figure running past the entrance. The strange thing is that I remember that this terrified me – and I still reflect on it as an inexplicable and very scary incident. I guess I must have already forgotten about the creatures who I apparently had so much fun with just a few years earlier. The final tale that my Aunt has always told me is that she is convinced I was abducted by aliens when I was little. Although I have always believed in, and been interested in, UFOs and Aliens; I’ve personally never believed this due to my absolute lack of memories of the ‘abduction’. But I consider my Aunt’s insistence of this abduction interesting. Apparently I spoke of technology I shouldn’t have known about (I was born in 91 – so I could have seen ‘modern’ technology on TV, but we certainly didn’t have anything more advanced than a wired house phone at the time). All of those instances are fairly run of the mill for children, and I have almost no memories of any, but my story really starts to get interesting with my dreams.
Dreams of Osiris
I don’t remember my exact age (I think from around 5 until 8), but for a few years of my childhood I had recurring dreams. The dreams were always a journey and a destination. The destination was always the same but the journey would be different every night. One night I recall dreaming that I was looking down out of my bedroom window at a woman who was looking up at me. Suddenly I was beside her. She was mottled, with seaweed in her hair; as if she had been underwater for a long time. She was the spitting imagine of our local bogeyman Peg Powler, but she felt perfectly benevolent. She took me to Osiris.
My journeys to Osiris were varied. Sometimes, they were fun: once I travelled there on a water slide. Sometimes they were scary: I was frequently chased by creatures such as giant spiders or living flames. I imagine that the journeys there were influenced by whatever I was thinking about in my waking hours. Maybe I’d wanted to go on a waterslide one day, another day I might have been frightened by a spider. Maybe my kind hearted Peg Powler had been influenced by a mermaid in a movie. I don’t remember specifics. But I remember Osiris clearly; as clearly as if it was a place I have genuinely visited.
Osiris was a large crater and along the top of the ridge stood a ring of great stones; they were much more polished than the menhirs that litter the British and French countryside. They were perfect squares with plants and flowers carved into them. On my adventures to Osiris I always knew that when I reached the stones I would be safe, nothing could pass them. Nothing that intended to harm me, and nothing that intended to help. I was the only person who could pass the stones. Even my mottled guide couldn’t pass the invisible barrier. I was the only creature that could walk on the surface of Osiris; but that doesn’t mean that I was the only sentient thing there.
One of the first areas I would enter after walking down the ridge into the crater was a large clearing. In the centre of the clearing was a pond. The pond wasn’t particularly wide but it was deep. Very deep. Occasionally I would get into the pond and swim down – completely unafraid of drowning. I don’t remember if I recognised that I was in a dream, or if I thought that the stones were protecting me from the need to breath: most likely I just didn’t think about it, in that kind of dreamlike way. Swimming down took some time, but eventually the sides of the pond would widen out and I would enter into a city under the water – the only place where other sentient beings lived. The city was reminiscent of an ancient Athens, and as dilapidated as you would expect for a structure situated in a giant pond. The beings that lived there were friendly and I know that I talked to them, but I don’t remember what about. I can’t even recall what they looked like although my memories of them are fond. Unfortunately I have little to say of the denizens of this underwater nation other than that I would visit them when I felt lonely in my dream world.
As a child who didn’t often get lonely in life or dreams, I still explored the entirety of the crater’s surface. As I said, I was the only being that could walk the surface of Osiris. No birds sang to me as I walked through the trees beyond the clearing. No hedgehogs cut across my path in the forest. It was a silent place. Not a sinister or ominous silence, a peaceful silence. Osiris was a place of serenity. On the far side of the crater, beyond the trees, stood a beautiful palace once again reminiscent of Greek architecture. Unlike it’s submerged counterpart this palace was in a pristine condition. White marble gleamed in the never setting sun, internal fixtures stood eternally cobweb free as if cleaned by invisible hands. Empty of life but not empty; it’s walls were adorned with art, rooms filled with furniture. There was an entire room filled with medieval style armour and weapons. I had a distinct feeling that a man had once lived here, and that he had collected the items within. But he was gone, and I knew he’d never come back. Osiris was mine.
I felt the loss of Osiris when the dreams stopped. I didn’t dream of it every night so I won’t have noticed at first, and I can’t recall my final visitation. But after enough time had passed I felt it’s absence keenly. It has always been something that has stayed with me, like a friend I wish I could speak to again. Discovering that the Egyptians had a god by the same name blew my mind and I remember bothering a teacher about it at school, to no avail. When participating in a creative writing course a few years ago I wrote a short story about Osiris’ mysterious former tenant. The man I knew nothing about but whom I felt certain existed. I hypothesised that he had been a King, and my mottled guide his Queen. They had left the crater of their own accord, and every night the Queen would lead children there to play in the safety of the silent forest.
I don’t disregard the fact that these dreams could simply be the imagination of a creative child. However I can’t ignore the impact that this has had on my life. Osiris has followed me – influencing my interests and inspiring my creativity.
A Sceptical Experiencer
If you are reading this blog you would certainly be forgiven for thinking that I have been an ardent believer in the paranormal my whole life. That would be half true; I have always been an ardent believer in Aliens: nuts and bolts, little green men visiting us in their shiny silver ships. I was an agnostic atheist and aliens fit into my concept of reality being a tangible, simplistic thing. Ghosts, ghouls and Gods didn’t fit so easily into my reality. Seconds ticked into minutes and what you could touch, existed.
Despite this, I was experiencing phenomena I couldn’t easily explain. I have always seen odd things and I have always put it down to tricks of the light, a lack of sleep or an overactive imagination. It is easier to explain away things such as shadows moving in the corners of your eyes and figures seemingly flitting past at speeds you cannot comprehend – things people everywhere experience every day. Even the intense sleep paralysis I suffered was easily explained. Shadow figures would stand at the foot of my bed, neither ominous nor comforting. When I couldn’t see them, they would whisper in my ears, telling me to stay calm. I would feel hands grabbing me and running through my hair, invisible creatures disturbing the bed as they sat down next to me. The sleep paralysis has never frightened me, even though some of the stories I have certainly seem very disturbing. But sleep paralysis is a medical issue – and I have always had problems with my sleep; I frequently suffer dreams so vivid that I wake up even more tired than I went to bed. Occasionally I remember them as well as I remember Osiris – although my childhood dreams are tame in comparison to those that sap my energy with such intensity.
As I explained away all the strangeness of my life with such infallible logic the phenomena did what the phenomena does best; it decided to play the trickster. I, who did not believe in ghosts, started seeing them with remarkable clarity. I was experiencing my sleep paralysis in my waking hours.
[Before I start with this section of my story I should explain that, whilst I have never at any point felt that these experiences were evidence of mental illness, I did seek medical help at first. I presumed that I was hallucinating due to lack of sleep and my doctor agreed that there was no evidence that I was suffering any form of psychosis. I have never seen or heard anything that caused me distress or that I suspected was damaging to me.]
It started simple; I was home alone and washing the dishes when I noticed movement in the doorway to the left of me. I turned to look and saw a man with very short blonde hair, wearing a leather jacket and blue jeans. I saw him so clearly that I thought someone had broken into my house. He walked to the right side of my door and into a corner of my living room with no exit – the only way that I could leave my house would be to walk past him. Despite truly believing that there was a man in my house I was remarkably calm; I quietly put down the plate I was washing, picked up my phone and walked into the empty living room. There was no way that man could have gone anywhere from that corner of the room unseen by me: but he wasn’t there. I stayed calm until I left the house and then, when on my front porch, the fear hit me. I rang my housemate and refused to go back inside until she came home (which she didn’t do quickly – opting to go for a MacDonald’s first). I saw that man again, a few years later. I was working in France as a rep on a holiday site. I was stood in the kitchen of an empty customer accommodation facing a reflective backsplash. Reflected in the surface I saw the same blonde man as before walk behind me; and when I turned, he wasn’t there. Once again I felt no fear – I had witnessed other apparitions in the interim years and I’d never been afraid despite some of them being objectively creepy. Once I saw a woman with long hair peering at me around the corner of my kitchen door [I’m only just realising that a lot of these ghouls tend to appear to me around kitchens. Maybe that is a synchronicity I am yet to understand, or maybe the phenomena is simply reminding me to clean out the fridge]. When walking up my bedroom stairs one evening I saw a young boy sat at the top of them, calmly staring at me. I frequently see my housemate’s cats running around my room (where they know they’re not allowed) and as I get up to chase them out I realise that they’re not there and the door is locked (to keep them out). My personal favourite apparition was a bat flying around my kitchen that magically disappeared whilst I was watching it.
My Next Steps
I am only starting to get an idea of what the beings that I see are trying to tell me (and they never speak, so they’ve completely left me to work that out by myself). The phenomena has ramped up recently and one of the strangest, and most affirming, paranormal experiences of my life happened earlier this week. I’m not going to discuss that, or what I think the phenomena is trying to say, in this article – as this is something I’m looking into right now; and I intend to run an experiment in which I try to contact whatever is trying to communicate with me very soon.
I have no interesting ending to this article as I have no conclusive end to my experiences – and I’m certainly hoping that the end of that won’t be coming any time soon. I guess the best way to end this would be with a rather cheesy ‘stay tuned to see where this goes’.
So
Stay tuned to see where this goes.
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