Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2026
Strange dream of an alien saying, “Human perception is the easiest thing to change”
by: Brent Raynes
“I DO feel they can control who sees and experiences what and when.”
-Char Touchstone
In last month’s Reality Checking I wrote a feature entitled “Synchronicity: An Interactive Form of Psychic Dynamics?” It concerned a personal series of synchronistic interactions that seemed to go on between myself and an experiencer named Char Touchstone. Another one that I didn’t mention (there are still more) hinted at something else I had been certainly toying with at the time. That would have been what the late psychologist Carl Jung called psychoid where what witnesses see may embody unusual subjective, psychic dimensions of perception. Jung even had such an experience, which he described in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959): “I was once at a spiritualistic séance where four of the five people present saw an object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.”
In ufology these types of incidents are even more common than most mainstream ufologists realize. In Char Touchstone’s case I toyed with the idea of including this account that she had shared with me back in August 2022, but I skipped past it while fighting with my deadline and focusing on what I felt were the more impressive details at the time. Nonetheless, here it is. She was on her way to work one morning, fighting slow Nashville traffic, when she spotted a huge triangular looking craft with flashing lights on each tip. “About a couple of months ago, I was headed into work and passed by the airport as I always do,” she wrote. “As you know, I leave for work very, very early, so this was about 6 a.m. Traffic was already heavy and so I found myself sitting at a standstill by the airport. Something caught my eye. I looked up and saw a large triangular craft! My mouth dropped open, and it just sat there. It wasn’t moving. Then, suddenly, it moved and was gone. I looked around and no one seemed to see what I was seeing.” “I saw it very clearly and it was huge. There was even a plane flying past it, but it just sat there in the sky, and then whoosh it was gone. It had the usual flashing lights on each tip and it was at least 10 times larger than the plane flying past it, but as I looked around at the cars sitting all around me, no one else appeared to have seen it. I saw it!” Recently, on Saturday, August 8th, my wife Joan and I were attending the Open Inquiry Group that featured guest speaker Jeff Ballard at the Meteor Buffet in Huntsville, Alabama. At the height of the event, I looked around and did a head count of about twenty-five in attendance. Jeff is a certified consulting hypnotherapist with a Master of Science degree in Counseling Psychology. He has a keen interest in what he refers to as “anomalous trauma,” which could be so-called alien abductions, past lives, or even so-called ghost or spirit encounters. [https://anomaloustrauma.com]
At one point during Jeff’s talk, conversation with audience members drifted into a discussion on how some “experiencers” seem to perceive things that others don’t. I jumped in and mentioned Jung’s “psychoid” story detailed at the beginning of this article and then mentioned the late MUFON lead investigator of Tennessee, Angelia Sheer, whose book UFO Encounters: How High Strange Events Transform Human Perception (2020), which touched upon a case that changed how she looked at the UFO enigma. “The case involved a group of people star watching on a beach,” she wrote. “There were about 14 individuals within about 25 feet of each other. At some point, about 4 of those people witnessed a pretty amazing UFO sighting. When questioned alone, they all described the same thing. They were articulate and in agreement about the shape, lights, and sound. What was extraordinary was the fact that the other 10 witnesses saw and heard nothing. No matter how hard the small group tried to point out the object, the others just could not see it.”
Angelia and I had a number of conversations about this and other hard to define “high strange” cases that can be found embedded within a large segment of the UFO data. She mentioned how she was going to write a second book where she’d dive even deeper into these often-neglected high strange rabbit holes of ufology, but unfortunately she passed before she was able to get around to it.
After Jeff’s talk, Sue Pitts, the main organizer of these monthly meetings, introduced me to Jeff and we began discussing further UFO and high strange elements. Several others from the meeting joined in and one man in particular brought up Angelia Sheer, and how it was as though he and Angelia had seemingly shared a UFO related dream. I quickly gathered a paper and pen and requested his contact information. This sounded like someone I ought to follow up with and be able to devote some one-on-one time to try and get a more complete understanding of whatever he might be willing to share. It sounded like it might be some of that high strange stuff Angelia and I used to talk about.
I phoned him two days later. It was an interesting conversation and soon he even sent me copies of the “same dream” episode he had mentioned and other odd experiences he’d had over the years from his personal journal entries.
In August 2020, this gentleman happened to catch an interview with Angelia on Coast-to-Coast AM radio. “In the episode, she talked about perception and how it may vary from person to person during UFO sightings and other high strangeness events,” he recalled in his journal. “For reasons unknown, I ended up having a very strong desire to get in contact with her and share my experiences with her. I felt as if I knew her, even though we had never met. She was the very first person I ever shared my experiences with, outside of my immediate family. In particular, in my initial email, I felt compelled to share my dream ‘Discussion with a higher being, late 1995,’ wherein a higher being told me, ‘Human perception is the easiest thing to change’ This is a phrase that I have been trying to understand for decades.”
“Angelia eventually contacted me and said she was excited to speak with me because she wanted to relate a very similar dream wherein a higher being told her, ‘Human perception is easily altered.’”
In our phone conversation, this man told me, “Anyway Angelia got my message and then she was curious to talk more because she had at least the same initial dream of talking to a being that could change its shape and then he said human perception is easily altered. It was almost the same words.”
In his dream he said he was in this “self-luminous room” like and how the being, to demonstrate its ability to control human perception, walked over to some windows. “We looked down to see the interstate. It was like four lanes in each direction. Then he said it was daytime with lots of cars and then he said look it was nighttime and they all turned on their lights and then boom, it was daytime again and they all turned off their lights, like nothing happened, just to demonstrate that they had the power over human perception.” “They could make it day or night. They could do anything and that we would never notice.” “He told me that he could appear as anyone he wanted, of any race, color, gender, or age. As he was telling me this, he was changing from one appearance to another instantly, demonstrating what he was saying. I asked him to show me what he really looked like, and he responded, ‘I cannot show you my true form because you would not be able to comprehend it.’ The meaning I inferred (or really more felt in my mind) was that I would end up dead because whatever his true form is, it would be so beyond the ability of the human mind to even begin to comprehend, that it would kill me.”
Over the years he’s had a number of UFO experiences.
Is it possible that the reason we have such a crazy variety of strange beings seemingly haunting and plaguing our planet is because Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious have absolutely run amok, or else perhaps an independent “outside intelligence” (extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial - pick and choose whichever suits your fancy) may be interacting with us.
Whatever the ultimate answer may be, it seems increasingly obvious that it involves a complex and confusing intermix of psychic and physical components at play. It reminds one here of stories and folklore involving shape-shifting beings and the trickster. I’m also reminded of the part in the 1989 movie Communion where actor Christopher Walken played Whitley Strieber in an episode where Strieber is portrayed meeting up with a group of aliens. At one point, one of the beings becomes a doppelganger of Strieber, acting as a magician with a wand, who proclaims, “I’m going to do a trick.” He adds, “The only thing that really matters here is what I am about to show you.” Then we see Strieber examining a mask of the Grey face featured on the cover of his book Communion when suddenly a lower portion of the alien mask breaks away and you see a strange dark wrinkled portion of a face. A startled Strieber is shown saying, “That’s not it. I didn’t come all this way for you to tell me that’s what it is. Is there something under that because I don’t believe that one. It’s like a box – a Chinese box. You open it. There’s another one inside, there’s another. You’re not going to let me see you, are you?” The doppelganger then exclaims, “It is a Chinese box and you’re not going to be allowed to see. Okay? So, just get that clear.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojkdW5UC_BQ
