Earlier Memories

I was talking to my mother about dreams, and I commented to her as I have too many others that I have a pretty good habit of remembering my dreams, a comment that got a surprising amount of resistance from some, but my mother was immediately in full agreement. She commented “I know, when you were young your dreams were so vivid you were afraid to go to sleep and we had to convince you they weren’t real.”

I thought about it for a second and then I said, “Oh right the alien.”

My mom shook her head and said with some measure of very polite irritation, “Yes the alien.”

When I was two years old or so, I crept of out bed, climbed up onto my desk, something I had been physically unable to do up to that point, and peered out the window. It was night, but half the sky looked almost like day, only the color of the sky was not that of the sun but more like some pale whitish green. There were circling lights of pure white directly overhead of the street in front of our house. Standing in front of the largest tree in our front yard there was a short man wearing very baggy white clothing, only his white gloves and boots seemed tight against his being. His features of his face were almost blank but definitely inhuman, his eyes were large and almost bug like in shape, size, and position on the head. He didn’t appear to have any hair and his mouth while stretching across his entire face was tightly shut. His whole being seemed to be the same white green of the light that was brightening the night, causing him to almost blend into the glow. He was unmoving, and the way his head was held he seemed to be staring aimless into nothing.

I glanced at him at first, thinking my eyes were deceiving me, but I slowly found the courage to peek my eyes over the window ledge and see him again, still unmoving. This went on for what seemed like a very long time, until I hid myself with wrapped curtains and watched him awkwardly hobble towards the center of the street light and vanish in an instant. The circling lights then went haywire, spiralling in every direction, losing there once circular form. Next thing I knew was back in my bed and quite relieved that the alien did not notice me watching him.

I was fascinated with aliens as a child, and I’m pretty sure that fascination began before this dream, but it was so vivid, and hapless, it seemed like it could have been a real event. Nothing happened in the dream that could have been unproven in the waking world. The alien did nothing to any property and was only here for a moment in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, and from the point of view of a child there was not any logical proof that dismissed the event as possible.

Sure looking back at it, the alien’s motionless body made him more like a cardboard cut-out that an actual living being and the very fact I was in one place, in front of my window on top of my desk and immediately somewhere else, my bed, is pretty convincing proof it was a dream. Furthermore I wasn’t tall enough to climb on top of my desk for another year of so.

It is probably one of my earliest memories of dreams, and the fact I remember it at all, I think is pretty impressive.