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Time for a Change I remember what life was like before the summer of 1955; and what life was like after what happened then. That was the first time things changed. It's the kind of experience that is akin to having your brain lifted, turned to the right several notches, and dropped back into place. Everything works as before, but your perspective is radically different. Before that night I was a chubby, trusting, happily innocent kid growing up in what I see in retrospect as idyllically normal surroundings, in what was then an isolated part of the Arkansas Ozarks, a few steps from the remains of the wagon road that the Cherokee call the Trail of Tears. I had a small bed in the corner of my parents' bedroom, our house being too small for much privacy, the product of two cabins shoved together by a neighbor's team of mules and my father's earliest concept of avante garde architecture. I went to sleep that night smiling, feeling safe, lulled by the songs of the night insects and whippoorwills. The blanket was tucked under my chin and at my side was my trusty stuffed rabbit, Hank, who I earned as a placating reward for running through the plate glass door of my father's general store and surviving, with only a few severe lacerations. I had no idea that this would be the last night I'd sleep with such an optimistic outlook on life. Even now, having fought my many battles, knowing the outcome is a good one, a chill does crawl up my back as I remember what happened. But it was a strange summer for all of us. I recall visiting my grandparents, towed along with the rest of my siblings, and sitting transfixed while my grandfather excitedly recounted to my father his tale of being abducted from the front porch by aliens. No one connected that to what had happened to me. I doubt I made the connection myself; it was all too strange and too unexpected to make good sense. It probably happened about three a.m. Most things of this type have happened to me in the early hours of morning, the time when people are most likely to be in deepest sleep and undefended. Something woke me out of that sleep--a sense of presence in the room and a strange light like the radiance of the full moon coming from the space beyond the foot of my bed, silvery white and brilliant through my closed eyes. When I opened my eyes I was looking directly at four small humanoid figures standing at the foot of my bed, silhouetted against the light. I could see no features in their faces, only shadows, and there seemed to be no source to the light itself. The silhouettes showed that the individuals were of varying height, from three and a half to four and a half feet tall; thin, with long arms and long fingers, and to my thinking, wearing hoods because I saw no sign of ears. One of the taller, central figures raised a hand and pointed a long thin finger at me. I tried to scream for my parents, who I could see in the bed on the right side of the room, sleeping as though drugged. I discovered then that I could not speak or move, held in place by a strange paralyzing force. A flash of blue light streaked from the hand of the visitor to my chest. A torrent of cold electric energy entered me at heart level, strong enough to stop my breathing and raise my body into a backwards arch, until I was resting only on the back of my head and the backs of my heels. After only seconds of this I passed out, remembering nothing beyond this when I awoke, in complete darkness, perhaps an hour later, screaming. My parents came to my side then, heard my muddled story, and assured me it was only a dream. I had no confidence in that but hoped it was true. Eventually I stopped crying and went back to sleep, but the rest of that night and for most of the rest of my life I had a distrust of the dark and an overwhelming terror living in the back of my mind, sometimes controlled and sometimes not. This was my first experience of what I call black time. It seemed as though an hour was missing from my life. Things were much different for me after this intrusion. The few pictures of me that survive from those days show a sudden transformation. I became thin, nervous, withdrawn; and perhaps coincidentally I began to avoid having my picture taken, something which I still abhor. There is very little visual record of any part of my life. For a few months I lived in horror that these entities would come back. I laid awake expecting that they would. I could no longer sleep with my head exposed to the night; I built tents of blankets and huddled inside surrounded by stuffed animals, convincing myself that they were capable of protecting me. For decades after this I was unable to sleep unless the top of my head was covered. I have no explanation for that beyond the vague intuition that something was done to me there, an operation of some sort that I have glimpsed only in pieces of scattered dreams. |
A few nights later I'd been put to bed earlier than the rest of the family, since I wasn't sleeping well and my behaviour was, well, unusual. I couldn't bear to be in a dark room by myself, so my mother sat with me for awhile and finally left a light on to calm me. I could hear the TV playing in the living room and the occasional voices of my parents and my sisters, and I became gradually more and more sleepy. I don't recall seeing energy before I was visited. Night was always dark before that; afterwards the darkness was always full of streamers of faint light, shifting patterns of reds, yellows, purples. This particular night they were very strong, persistent enough to show up in the half light of the bedroom, and as I looked into the half darkness these veils of faint glowing energies swirled and coalesced into a mass of moving colors directly in front of me, about five feet away. I was not disturbed by this, only curious--as I watched, the patterns of energy formed a picture much like a cartoon, and I recall being happy that I could watch TV in the bedroom even though I didn't have one. I recall a humming sensation in the room, a feeling of faint pressure that increased as the picture clarified and steadied. I saw suspended in the air in front of me the image of an Indian man dressed in the loose white clothing of northern Mexico. He was leading a burro, walking through a desert landscape studded with cacti, everything distorted by the waves of heated air roiling up from the sandy soil. The vision retreated, the figures becoming small, the desert itself becoming the face of a slowly turning grindstone. The Indian man and his burro trudged up the face of the grindstone, never stopping and unable to rest. Sometimes he would struggle ahead, but tire and fall back; sometimes he would slow and try to recover strength, but the impending darkness behind him, below the center axis of the wheel, always chased him back to his plodding place. He was a prisoner there, trapped in his life even without barriers or walls. The faint pressure upon me increased as I watched, becoming intensely claustrophobic. I didn't want to see any more but the vision and the feeling did not go away. Eventually I screamed. My mother came running and once again I tried to explain what had happened, the thing I could see that no one else could, and I was assured that it was only a bad dream. This vision would come back to me again and again during my youth, at quiet moments when I was playing, alone or with friends, even sometimes during classes at school. I would always react with growing physical tension, gripping whatever I held until the bones in my fingers crackled with pressure. Other people seeing this would think me strange. When I could break away from the experience I would laugh it off as nothing. I never again tried to explain this to anyone, until some forty years later I came to know its meaning. |
