Previously in Space: Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, & Part 4
Today is Extraterrestrial Abduction Day. Yes, I also think that's a weird sentence.
As I keep going over all these milestone-y memories related to my childhood obsession with space, I keep noticing just how mixed up I as a child was on some of the details relating to how I was shaping my look at the universe (hence the ficus issue).
To the best of my knowledge and memory, I don't know anyone who admits/believes they were abducted by aliens. I know plenty of people that claim to have seen ghosts, but no one with an alien story.
Other than... me. Sort of. I'm 95% positive it was just a series of dreams mixed with odd deja vu feelings. I usually forget about for years at a time until something will happen and I'll suddenly be reminded of those hazy memories I had. I don't even know where exactly to begin with this...
When I was about four years old, I'm pretty sure I told a boy at daycare that my friend that was a spaceship was going to fly by that day while we were playing to prove that it was real. No spaceship flew past us. I was sad and letdown. The boy didn't really care (why would he care about spaceships? He wanted to go up to be a Ninja Turtle).
What prompted me to tell him the spaceship was going to fly by was that I had at least three separate dreams as a very young child that involved a small round spaceship (around the size of a conversion van but more spherical) landing in my front yard. It would send me a sign of somesort to let me know it was minutes away from landing in the yard. Usually, I was already outside and I'd stand around bored/over-excitedly waiting for it to show up. One time, I remember seeing it through the window of my childhood living room and it took my parents too long to let me have permission to go outside. My mother gave me grief about wanting me to go change out of the shorts I was wearing and into long pants before going out and I felt the need to argue with her about the subject. I lost the argument. And by the time I got outside, the space ship was taking off already without me.
I can't remember if that was the last time I dreamed of it, or if the last dream was after the no-show at daycare.
It had thin landing legs that would hold the round body of the ship just a few feet off the grass. The ship had a name that seemed really normal and human-y. Something like "Sally" but probably not Sally. It spoke to me in someway but not outloud. It was like a person.
A hole would appear in the bottom of the ship and I would dip between the landing legs and climb into the ship via the hole- having to get my hands on the floor inside to push myself up and all the way inside the ship. Then the hole would go back to being part of the floor. And the floor was a big tinted window showing the grass in the yard below the ship. From the outside, the ship appeared to have no windows, but on the inside most of the walls would be windows allowing you to see the glare and tint distorted versions of the surroundings of the ship. There would also be various blinking lights on some consoles, but I don't remember ever having much to do with those. I'd just kneel on the floor and view all the windows that were down low at that height. I had no interest in looking higher.
The ship would talk to me while I was inside. Tell me things that didn't really make sense. It had a comforting feeling to be around- not so much like a parent but like an older sister or aunt. I'm pretty sure the ship was a girl. It wouldn't take me anywhere for long or really far away, at least not that I ever remember. For the most part, I just remember flying up just high enough to be above the roof of my house and maybe going through the cornfields behind our house. I had no concept yet about how the spaceship would've been from space and that space was in the stars and so on. I do, however, remember being super excited the first time I saw the roof of my house from the ship- it was missing a couple shingles and there was a frisbee and a few lost balls on the roof.
It's memories like those that make me question if it was in fact a series of dreams. And the argument with my mother about wearing long pants outside. Why would I dream about that? I didn't even win the argument!
But, other than all that, I can't remember much more. There's something about the sign of the spaceship's landing involving toys in the bushes but I don't really know what that was about.
Like I said, I don't think these were real experiences and, if they were, I have no idea what or why they would be about. I do know that part of the reason the movie Contact hit me so hard is because the look of the floor when she's in the machine and suddenly seeing through the machine reminded me of the dreams for the first time in a long time (possible four years since I had previously thought about those dreas).
It also could've been that I saw Flight of the Navigator and Explorers when I was far too young and my brain has pieced together things from those movies into thoughts of old dreams.
But the ship was no where near as slick, gigantic, and complicated as the one in FotN and the ship in Explorers was too small and too made-by-hand. Neither worked much like the one in my dreams.
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