What happened when I was seven

Benway

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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.
 
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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.

Good morning (in the USA) Benway. That was an interest event.

Seems that you and I had some little similar youth. Though neither of my parents had any religious leanings at all, they supported my interests as early as age four. They even paid so that I could attend Christian-based school for four years. And when I told them I wasn’t feeling the spirit, they allowed me to move into public school.

Now for that visual incident - two hypothesis. Maybe you were seeing your cousin’s future. Maybe he astral projected to you. I know you said you chose not to talk with your parents about the incident; did you ever speak with your cousin about it?

As for the fact you had a visual incident but no sound, even people who have very strong, very frequent psi events don’t receive input into all the familiar senses. Seems that sometimes Benway psi messages don’t contain info for all senses. Certainly it’s agreed that not all psychic individuals perceive messages the same way. For example, if you only received psi info audibly, that is referred to as clairaudience. Since I don’t know better (yet), I believe that any senses excluded from a particular psi message could be due to the receiver, the message content itself, or if another person is involved then even the sender of the message could be the cause.

Sounds like you’ve got more to share. Those will be more pieces in the puzzle.
 
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.
It will be interesting to read your journey, Ben. I believe each of us has a path to walk here on this plane. We all must find our way, whether it's in faith through religion or a different kind of walk. Yours started, at what seems to be for many of us on the paranormal path, early in life. We respect all religions and beliefs here, so reading your walk will be fascinating as I don't think we've had many pagans relate their journey.
I'm glad you have such clarity of the events.
 
Thanks, everybody! I never worked up the courage to mention it to my cousin. He lived in another part of the country and I rarely saw him and for many years he's lived in another country entirely, so on those rare meetings, "Uh, I once saw you floating outside my window holding a Bible" just seemed too much of a leap! In any case, there is more to this and though I wondered about astral projection at the time (and there can't be many seven year olds who know about that!) I don't think it was. But I'll get to that later when I write about the subsequent things that happened.

WandS, the comment about the lack of sound was interesting. That's an element of this that I never focussed on at all in all these years and it's only through writing it down and discussing it that what's absent has really registered. I always thought about what was there and only seeing it written down that something was missing has caused me to register it as important. Yes, I think a limitation in transmission. Also interesting is the concept that it was a psychic rather than physical experience. That seems obvious now, but in childhood and into my teens the idea of questioning my own perception of reality was unknown and so I spent years jumping through hoops trying to explain it as a physical event. When I stepped up my reading of anything paranormal the standard view put forth was that everything was physical and that fed into it. Following what I'd read I ended up with the byzantine theory that there had been a nuts and bolts alien spaceship outside projecting an image in an attempt to make contact and that for some reason it had paralysed everyone else and then erased their memories! If psychic episode follows Occam's razor, then that theory follows Occam's entire men's toiletries department!

In any case, I think it was an attempt at communication that went wrong. The religious symbolism and the emotions of fear and awe are clear, but I think the face was an image intended to convey certain feelings pulled from my subconscious and as I sort of only really felt worshipful towards my cousin I got him instead of an angel or Jesus or whatever else. So, a religious experience and screw-up!
 
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Another point is that I have no memory of going to sleep after this. Surely it would have been even more difficult, but the memory ends with the vision going and then nothing. I do remember waking up and eagerly looking at the chaos caused only to find everything back in it's right place. So going by my early theory, the aliens tidied up before they left.
 
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Thanks, everybody! I never worked up the courage to mention it to my cousin. He lived in another part of the country and I rarely saw him and for many years he's lived in another country entirely, so on those rare meetings, "Uh, I once saw you floating outside my window holding a Bible" just seemed too much of a leap! In any case, there is more to this and though I wondered about astral projection at the time (and there can't be many seven year olds who know about that!) I don't think it was. But I'll get to that later when I write about the subsequent things that happened.

WandS, the comment about the lack of sound was interesting. That's an element of this that I never focussed on at all in all these years and it's only through writing it down and discussing it that what's absent has really registered. I always thought about what was there and only seeing it written down that something was missing has caused me to register it as important. Yes, I think a limitation in transmission. Also interesting is the concept that it was a psychic rather than physical experience. That seems obvious now, but in childhood and into my teens the idea of questioning my own perception of reality was unknown and so I spent years jumping through hoops trying to explain it as a physical event. When I stepped up my reading of anything paranormal the standard view put forth was that everything was physical and that fed into it. Following what I'd read I ended up with the byzantine theory that there had been a nuts and bolts alien spaceship outside projecting an image in an attempt to make contact and that for some reason it had paralysed everyone else and then erased their memories! If psychic episode follows Occam's razor, then that theory follows Occam's entire men's toiletries department!

In any case, I think it was an attempt at communication that went wrong. The religious symbolism and the emotions of fear and awe are clear, but I think the face was an image intended to convey certain feelings pulled from my subconscious and as I sort of only really felt worshipful towards my cousin I got him instead of an angel or Jesus or whatever else. So, a religious experience and screw-up!

Well yeah, it is kind of hard to ask anyone least a distant relative if they silently traveled through a tunnel of light into your bedroom dressed as a priest.

Glad you’re sharing and open to some inputs and possibilities from others. I would never be smart enough to quote Occam’s Razor but I’m glad you did because I do suspect that it is more likely your incident happened in your mind (by that I don’t mean to imply you made it up or are mental) than it happened outside as a physical manifestation. However, I don’t exclude the physical occurrences as possible too.

I have found even just in the past month here at (insert commercial for) PNF.net, that if I share, lots of people with share back with ideas, inputs, confirmations, questions, and challenges. All of which have helped me further examine my own experiences.

I’m about to get interrupted here at home so I’ll end there for now. If you post more, I will reply of course. If I think of anything more that’s meaningful on you points above I’ll be certain to share them.
 
Ben have you ever considered hypnosis ?
I agree that whatever was trying to contact you was using a presence of something you would accept. First a religious figure and when that frightened you it tried your cousins appearance. Perhaps hypnosis might unlock suppressed memories to help you understand what happened
 
Ben have you ever considered hypnosis ?
I agree that whatever was trying to contact you was using a presence of something you would accept. First a religious figure and when that frightened you it tried your cousins appearance. Perhaps hypnosis might unlock suppressed memories to help you understand what happened
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.
 
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: A 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.
 
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