Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2026
Strange Memories
By: John Jackson (pseudonym)
One evening in Mid-March of 2002, I was walking in the cold dead of night in a neighborhood which seems to me to be on the south end of Bloomington. I could see my breath far out beyond my reach and I could feel the ground firmly under my feet as I walked thorough this really dead quiet neighborhood that curved around like an old suburban setting. I had this attitude in my mind and purpose in my walk that I needed to get somewhere on the other side of a woods hat was just a hundred feet off. I entered the woods, still seeing my breath, and proceeded perhaps another hundred feet into the woods when I became aware of the sound of someone walking behind me. I stopped and turned, and he stopped still.
“He” was a little guy in a “peeked hood.” There seemed to be at least two of them behind me. Perhaps three. When I turned, he stopped still. I continued on just like it was normal. I walked about another 20 feet, still thinking that I had to get to the other side of the woods, when all of a sudden, I shot straight up into the air above the leafless March Indiana treetops. I could look down and see the trees illuminated by a dull glow above me. Then, all of a sudden, I was back on the ground, near the end of the woods with my companions behind me and I walked over this small hill unto an UNREAL ASTOUNDING COSMIC, UNEARTHLY HORIZEN that was colored pink and lavender with exotic spheres and amazing objects. I just went AWE, like my OHHHHH. Like I was shown some special privileged thing or space. Awestruck! I turned and started walking with my “friends” the other way and it became daylight and we came over another hill and down in a cleared depression was this FABULOUS JADE GREEN DOME sitting on the ground in which I went OHHHHHH once again. I walked down to it and entered it and don’t remember anything until I was standing outside of it again seeing Ground Vehicles taking off at high speeds in a couple of directions. This area opened up there from woods to real arid desert like area. In front of me about ten feet away three guys in “peeked hoods” (still daytime and overcast). The one to my right walked off to my right and pulled down his hood as he departed like he was hot. As he walked away I could see fully the side of his skull. It was HUGE and BULBOUS behind the ear especially, and he had real, real thin long hair that was messed up by pulling down the hood. The hair was only behind the ears and to the back. Light brown to grey. His skin was pale white. I then looked at the taller middle one and he took his hood down and for Christ sakes he fixed his eyes on me and grinned like he knew me. His skull went way back behind the ears. His eyes were solid black and they were set apart just about as side as a human’s. They were not real large like in some movie. His eyes curved up like a teardrop to a point.
The kicker here is I pointed at him and said (although I could not hear any sound) “ARE YOU AN ALIEN?” He walked over where I had pointed my index finger of my right hand at him when I asked this, and he took my index finger and gave it a clockwise turn and that ended my consciousness of the experience.
To this day nobody knows where I was that night and I really, sometime the next day, started relating this as a lucid dream that I had had to my friends. However, I have come to realize that this was not a dream.
I feel like I’ve been given a gift. A kind of insight.
I was doing dream research and I was reading about the Hopi Indians and how they would share their dreams among themselves. They are apparently a very at peace tribe. One of the things that they would do when falling in a dream, instead of waking up through fear they would follow the faill and fight through the fear all the way to the ground. I did this, and actually through the ground into a kind of alternate reality, or some state that I am unable to describe. After this, periodically through the years I would have dreams of flying and hovering and doing acrobatics. But once in a while I would take off from my bed and penetrate the side wall of my house or go through the ceiling to the outside. Those are beginning to look a little more curious. Did I ever get the impression that I was actually physically hovering. I don't think so. But I have developed a notion of luminous and astral bodies. Casteneda referred to developing your double through dreaming and the ancient Egyptian concepts of Ba and Ka come to mind. Keep in mind it’s not as though I have some pathological history of abnormal dreaming here. These are special dream events out of the context of normal dreaming spread out over the last 33 years or so. I’ve had a couple of profound spiritual dreams that were way, way out there.
I was in our backyard on a bright mid-summer afternoon. My brothers and a few friends were throwing the basketball at a basket we had nailed to a tree. (This is after all Indiana) and I noticed one of the kids pointing to the sky in the north. We all turned and looked to see three glimmering shiny silver mirror like disks traveling silently at a good clip from east to west about a mile off perhaps, 30 degrees above the horizon. I caught sight of them for about three seconds when they just disappeared. They could have shot off at a right angle at a high rate). About two minutes later a squadron of about ten of those wedge shaped jets scrambled over the top of our house from Baer Field where they have a major National Guard presence.
My father was a waist gunner on B-17 stationed out of England and he was always taking us kids out to the airport to watch planes. He even took us over to Wright Patterson once and took us out to Rapid City in 1960 once where he was stationed before England. So, we knew the difference between planes and not planes. These were symmetrical, top to bottom, and elegantly curved perfectly front to back and symmetrical that way too, with a length to width ration of about 4 to 1. To this day, my brothers and me still say do you remember that? We never told our parents (or at least I didn’t). This was not any kind of abduction scenario. We just happened to be there, or so I would believe. My two older brothers are both real straight Purdue Grads, the oldest is a Vietnam Vet and a member of MENSA and works for a big law firm in downtown Indy and the other is a teacher in the Fort Wayne Community School System. I’m sort of a Dark Sheep (compared to them anyway).
