What happened when I was seven

I once considered hypnosis as a good option, but after looking into regression hypnosis, it seems that it really isn't a good option for getting at any truth as it just accesses the subconscious and is more likely to confuse things with imagination and dream imagery. This is frustrating given what happened years later (which I honestly will write about) but I'm at the point where I think the best way to go in missing memories cases is just to try to remember. If it's there it is and if not tough. In this case I don't think I have many, if any surpressed memories though and I really did just experience that and what I described was the point of the thing and not a screen memory. Again, that'll make more sense as I relate the other experiences.

I can appreciate your concern about the possible misuse of hypnosis. I did some hypnosis work for self-help when I was 20 and it can be a powerful technique for focusing your intent. However, I suspect but don’t have any evidence that hypnosis could be used to create false memories. My only suggestion based upon that limited personal experience is that if hypnosis is going to be tried to access memories, it should be done with a reputable practitioner who knows the exact intent/goal. In my own hypnoidal mediations I certainly used visualizations that caused me some confusion during my waking hours for most of a two week period. I was able to easily undo the effects once I recognized what I had done. No long lasting effects came from that. But it taught me to be more specific, more clear about what I visualize during meditation.
 
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After my odd experience when I was seven I really plunged into the paranormal, reading anything I could get my hands on, asking questions of everybody until they deflected me
(my favourite is my dad while driving.
Me: But I want to know everything!
Dad: The universe is so big and so full of incredible things that nobody could ever know all of it!
Me: I will!
Dad: I wise man knows that he doesn't really know anything! (Gets back to driving)
That was paraphrased!)

My dad's collection of the classic partwork The Unexplained was much studied (and I STILL have it!) and I read and watched anything else about UFOs or the unexplained. I was convinced that far from being my cousin or God, that aliens had visited me, entirely based on nothing much. It's a cliche now, but back then everything really was because "ALIENS!" Why they'd decided after travelling all that way and hiding out on Earth for years, they'd decided to jump out and say boo to a seven year old kid dressed up as that was a puzzle, but clearly 'extraterrestrials' was the best answer for anything.

During this period I really wanted to experience more paranormal things and would have killed for a Ouija board but nothing much happened. I lived down the road from the Peterborough Central Park. It's very cool and (I kid you not) has (if you wander off the path at the right spot) there amidst the trees a real Victorian lamppost just standing there in the trees like Narnia! My best friend lived across the road from the park in one of the big houses (his dad was a lawyer) and his bedroom looked out at the grave of Jimmy, a donkey mascot from the first world war. One foggy morning he looked out the window and saw the donkey standing in the trees.

Just over the road was All Saints Church which was at the end of my street. There was a smallish wooden statue of Mary cradling the infant Christ in her arms outside and I was sure that his head was cradled in her right arm, but during a round the block bike race (good times!) it had switched to the other arm. I stopped and looked and baby Jesus had reversed position. I called all the local kids together and we all stared at the statue but... nobody had really paid much attention to the statue and nobody could hand on heart remember how it looked before, so it all ended up as an infuriating 'possibly misremembered the statue' thing and that may be right. Or not. Still, I thought I'd mention it for the sake of completeness.

Oh, and when I was about eleven or twelve we were asked to write about a significant religious experience for religious education class (secular school now but there's no escape from R.E.) and committed my first act of spinning by writing about the time I was seven but missing out the bits that contradicted it being a religious experience. I got a good grade too! In retrospect, I hope my RE teacher didn't take it too seriously.

Mr. Benway, glad to read your recent sharings.

I’m interested in UFO and cryptozoology stuff. I was much more interested in both when I was younger before I got sucked up into all that is spirit and psi. I’ve run out of time and brain-space for studying those other areas but always looking to read more on both. I shared that caveat because I’m turning inputs back to what I know more about.

I cannot help you rule out the idea of a UFO/ET being at the root of your experience. But the fact that you would have focused on that as the source back then is reasonable not only because of your interests in the topic and not only because there was a lot in the public/commercial arenas about UFOs back then. As material creatures - with material bodies - it can be generally easier to think about material causes for an experience like yours.

Because I’ve grown more experienced in and comfortable with non-material areas over the past 40 years, I’m more confident sharing ideas from related disciplines. So for near term Benway, I’ll continue to share like inputs to your posts.

Hey I like too that you crafted your experience for reuse in your religious studies class. Heck, if an ET walked out of a UFO right into your bedroom and handed you a business card, I’d think you’d be right to author that into a religious studies essay too.
 
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It’s possible it was not aliens. Perhaps you have a gift and at times can connect to another dimension or to deceased spirits.
 
Thanks for the feedback, both of you. It's very much appreciated! WanndS, your thoughtful responses are very welcome. My thoughts on this have changed over the years with subsequent experience and research and I now think E.T.s from the planet Remulac is deeply unlikely and unsupported by any evidence at all. Lynne, your 'gift' comment is interesting. I'm not sure why it is that I've experienced such odd things when most don't, but there must be some reason. However, I've only experienced things in certain areas, so I think perhaps that rather than me being the focal point, that it was an interaction between me and the area around my house, the church and the park. I've read some interesting things about 'window areas' where UFO reports seem to abound and everyone knows about hauntings.

Other dimensions are a tricky thing to really wrap our heads around, but boil down to here put imperceptible, so maybe. Spirits of the dead I had honestly never considered.
 
One of the reasons I joined this forum was that I wanted to put the bizarre experiences I've had out there and hopefully talk about them. It seems to me that the best way to go is by starting at the beginning and going on from there. Which means this is going to get off to a rocky start and some serious straining of credibility because it started with this.

When I was seven I went to big school. To be precise it was a Church of England junior school in England in 1984. Being a CofE school Christianity suddenly became a higher priority than singing "Cucumber Mi'Lord" or wearing a tea towel on my head and wondering where to put my hands as Donna waved a dolly around and pretended to have given birth to Jesus. It wasn't heavy handed at all, but the subject was actually discussed and I, (having been raised by a man from a vaguely muslim background who didn't believe and a woman from a christian background who felt likewise that I should make my own mind up) thought that I should give this whole thing some thought, and so I decided to give christianity a try. This ended up being a little stranger that I might have expected.

One evening in 1984 I had been packed off to bed despite not being even slightly tired. An insane injustice which would not be allowed to ever happen again when I ruled the world because it was stupid.

I lay there, annoyed, bored and not at all tired in my room. I'd been allowed to pick from a selection of things for my room and it was off-white with lots and lots of red and dark blue curtains with Superman all over them. Nothing happens with any of that, but it seems as well to set the scene.

After roughly three hundred years of lying there in the worst torment I could imagine I began to think about ghosts and the paranormal. I'd picked up stories and seen pictures and was fascinated by the whole thing. Obviously it was all true. Everything was, including Doctor Who, Star Trek and the A-Team. We were being visited by aliens. Ghosts were real and there were dinosaurs in Loch Ness. Everything was true unless proven otherwise.

Except God which was the opposite but I'd decided to give that a go too and now considered myself a Christian.

While I was thinking about all of this I began to creep myself out. It got worse and worse until I was was truly terrified and at then my Superman curtains were blown back and a nearly blinding blue/white light blasted straight at me. There was no sound, but the sensation of a howling gale and papers and comics were blown around as if the sound should be deafening.

I squinted into the heart of the storm, terrified, but forcing myself to look. It had to be aliens. In the centre of the light just beyond my window I saw a robed figure, colours washed out by the brilliance of the light. He was tall (as everyone was to me then) and radiated menace and authority. He wore a large crucifix around his neck and carried a huge old book under one arm. His other arm was raised in a sign of benediction. (I had no idea what it was called then.) His face... was where it all turned inside out. It was my cousin!

MY COUSIN! The impossibly cool definitely not religious teenager with high top Nikes decorated with his tag, the coolest person I'd ever met! I stared in... I have no idea how to describe how I felt. I think it may be unique.

Then it was over. I wanted to talk to my parents but they hadn't arrived during the whole thing and that meant that they'd somehow not noticed any of this and would just say I was asleep and dreaming. So would everyone! The whole thing was amazing apart from the identity bit and that was just ridiculous.

The next day my room was tidy as if nothing had happened. Everything blown off of my desk was back in its place, books were on the shelf and there was no evidence of anything happening. It occurred to me that my cousin may have died and I might have seen his ghost calling out from heaven, but luckily nobody was upset and it soon became clear that he was very much alive. This was a huge relief but left me with no explanation for any of this insanity. I couldn't even tell anybody about it without lying because everyone would laugh it off. I was in a bizarre place of being both awestruck and disgusted and disappointed that it couldn't have been something like a spaceship or alien or some lights so I could tell people!

So there it is. The following year I was horribly ill and was sent out of morning assembly to wait to be taken home. I was in the school library looking at a model of Noah's ark with all the cute animals with the sound of hymns in the background and it just hit me that every other animal other than those drowned and so did all the people and at that point my Christianity died. God might be real but if he was I didn't like him and aliens were real and I had a mystery of my own. I began to mouth the words of prayers and hymns rather than say them out loud and read everything I could lay my hands on about UFOs, the paranormal, mythology, magic, the occult in a search of some explanation.

Obviously, my life went on but that's the start of my relationship with the paranormal.
I know one important thing about God. We each need to develop our own relationship with God it comes from a higher learning for me. I had to be at my lowest to turn and ask for Gods help that is a story I dont care to get into all the time (Most of the time)I know now that it's okay to be myself no matter what I feel do or say God is with me because I ask him to be.

My Father was a preacher I know god differently than he did because I am a different person.
 
I'm not sure why it is that I've experienced such odd things when most don't, but there must be some reason.

Thanks again Benway for your continued respectful responses and sharing. You offer so many ideas in such a small amount of text that it makes me want to respond with a thesis. Lot of ideas we could discuss.

Let me share quick inputs on two or three. First the quote above. Are you sharing that most of the people that you know - like families and mates - don’t seem to have these occurrences? I believe that more people than we know have, for example, psychic capabilities but either don’t themselves ever have the inputs reach their consciousness, some do but don’t want to discuss or admit it, and others doubt and actively dismiss them. Like just about anything not just the paranormal, polled and published statistics are probably artificially low.

Or maybe you’re implying that your own occurrences are “too” odd. I’ll be happy to compare weird with you on any thread. Don’t feel alone with the weird. :p

If you have dimensional ideas you want to discuss, bring them on. I’m interested. I suspect that our consciousness’ (plural) can be a possible cause for multiple intersecting dimensions.

I get the idea from your tone that your searching for the reasons for these activities. Me too. Many of us might help to find the answers together.
 
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I know one important thing about God. We each need to develop our own relationship with God it comes from a higher learning for me. I had to be at my lowest to turn and ask for Gods help that is a story I dont care to get into all the time (Most of the time)I know now that it's okay to be myself no matter what I feel do or say God is with me because I ask him to be.

My Father was a preacher I know god differently than he did because I am a different person.

I hope your unique relationship with your god is loving and rewarding Armand.

I think my relationship was only realized at about age 35. Quite literally out of nowhere I had an emotionally charged epiphany. I was high as a kite (without ingesting any mind altering substances) for about three days. I felt connected to everyone and everything that entire time. Sad to say the truth but I chose to work actively and aggressively to get back to feeling normal out of a fear that my newly perceived divine connection might lead me into insanity or into a state of grandeur and indifference to the mundane. Though I suppressed a part of that experience, I can still feel my connection to divinity.

Thank you Armand for sharing that your divinity could be realized even at the bottom of your life.
 
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Wow Wands it had to be really wonderful to have had such a connection to God. Most of us live on faith, but to have proof has to be wonderful and life affirming.
 
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Wow Wands it had to be really wonderful to have had such a connection to God. Most of us live on faith, but to have proof has to be wonderful and life affirming.

My perception of the connectivity was real - the feelings were real - and my conscious decision to feel differently was real too. However, I can’t unbiasedly be certain that something outside of myself changed Lynne. But inside then as today I do believe I have a materially deeper connection to my own divinity, one which I hope other people can get to feel for themself.
 
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Wow Wands it had to be really wonderful to have had such a connection to God. Most of us live on faith, but to have proof has to be wonderful and life affirming.

Lynne, let me add that based only upon my own, first-person experiences let me offer that I believe one’s connection to the divine can only come from first accepting that there really does exist a larger more encompassing and inclusive divinity, second that each of us are part of it, and last that each of us can feel that connection if we allow it.

I think that sounds a lot like faith. However, what I believe comes in three pieces not just one or two parts.

I think there could be one more important piece. In about 1994 I made a conscious decision not to lie - not even little white lies - any more. This includes not propagating even distant past statements and stories which I perceive could be false. This is not the same as being brutally honest. Like if my girlfriend asked, “Does this skirt make my butt look big?”, I would be very careful about how I answer because I elect not to lie but that doesn’t imply I have to be mean too. I could not respond in a way designed to give her an opportunity to come to the wrong impression - my response must be materially factual. But I still don’t have to be mean...unless I really intended my honest response to be hurtful.

At the point I made the choice to always tell the truth - which honestly is not easy to do cold turkey - the entire universe seemed to open up to me. It was after 1994 that my personal epiphany occurred; I was already at least one year down my journey of truth by that time.

My own perception is that it is factually difficult to be well connected to the divine and not be honest about the truths of that divine too.
 
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