The Space Between Part Five: Dreams and Memories

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.

Spacing Out, Part Four: The Sky Was Falling

Previously In Space: Introduction, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

Halloween 1994. I didn't go trick-or-treating that year, for whatever reason. Instead, I spent my night watching the craziest scariest thing on TV that I had ever seen at that time. Something that, when I mentioned it the next morning, no one else at school had watched it- which made it seem even freakier to me. For years, it was filed in the back of my head- something that I hoped was just a forgotten TV special or odd nightmare but might've been, in the end, something terrible that happened yet only I remembered- like from an alternate reality. Or something. In the 2000s, I'd occasionally search the internet to see if anyone else remembered it. Never finding anything helpful.

Until 2011. A friend and I were talking about seeing scary movies too young in life and not being able to process our memories from the scary movies. I brought up that phantom memory of a Halloween special. That's when we found it (the entire thing!) on YouTube: Without Warning.

And even he agreed, after watching clips, that it was kind of messed up, awesome, and terrifying at the same time.

Give Me Some Space, Part Three: Hale-Bopp, He Bop, A-We Bop...

Previously In Space: Introduction, Part One, and Part Two

I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more information about astronomy and space exploration than I can ever try to learn again. I had a knack for finding Discovery Channel specials about space as a kid and getting sucked into them. And then I had an even better knack for finding alien movies I was too young to watch and getting obsessed/terrified by them.

Can I still be her when I grow up?

I really wanted to work for the SETI Institute when I was about ten-years-old, because of a Discovery Channel special. "Even after Contact came out and made it sound like all there was to SETI was listening to radio static and arguing with bureaucrats?" You ask. Yes, I still was in love with the idea of working for SETI. And now? Some days it still sounds ideal. I mean, at least it's a non-profit that doesn't deal with government funding and is about something I find interesting. Not that I don't find other non-profits that I might currently work for interesting as well. Um, anyway... SPACE.

A few years  after the whole ficus plant experience, my sister and I had our own little twenty minute personal War of the Worlds moment. We were reading each other to sleep and one of us was flat in the bed, looking out the window above the bed and staring at the sky. And noticed there was a star that was... moving.

I'm not going to say which one of us it was that panicked, but I will mention that twenty years later, my sister (who is six years older than me, please note) once called me just to ask if I heard voices because the children on a "docu-drama" about psychic kids reminded her of how weird I am. This is our relationship.

But we basically freaked each other out by both seeing a star (something that obviously was not an airplane, as it wasn't blinking) that was moving and assuming that the aliens were circling the earth and we were the first to notice.

Thankfully, our first line of action was to tell our dad. Who then marched us outside to stand beneath the bedroom window and tell him where to look.

And then, of course, he told us it was just a satellite.

We went to bed, still slightly convinced that by morning the planet would be enslaved by aliens. And then completely forgot the experience by morning.

Well, for the most part. Until the next trip to the local mall where I saw a telescope at World of Science. Which was my favorite store in the mall for a good chunk of the 90s. So much stuff to touch! I got a giant goopy sticky neon blue slug thing! And then the store became Natural Wonders, which was still pretty good to kid me- I could still play with everything in there! It's just that there would be rain sticks and cds of whale songs but would also have like... fun magnet products and squishy brain-shaped toys. And the telescope. It was gorgeous and was $100. Which, to an nine year old, might as well be $100 million.

I knew nothing about what qualities to look for in a telescope other than the one on display at the mall made it so I could see into the Disney Store on the other side. Good enough for me! If I had a telescope, I could've SEEN if it was a satellite or space invaders (although, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference even if they were ten feet from my face in most cases. If that were to be a thing.) and been prepared if it had been an invasion! I needed a telescope to help save my planet!

This also happened to be around the time people were talking about the Hale-Bopp Comet. Which, the more I heard about the more obsessed I got with it. And, back in the days when AOL was 90% of the internet- people were still confusing the Hale-Bopp with Halley's Comet and would send tiny me into my first fits of nerdrage.

And the closer it got, the more I wanted that telescope. My memory is foggy, but I'm pretty sure my parents made me pay for it- at least partially. I think I might've requested to start an allowance system and a payment for good grade system for the first time in my life. Some of the money might've also come from my First Communion money. I don't think they really had any objections to buying their nerdy child a telescope but that the issue was more than it was probably a few months after they splurged on buying a Sega Genesis.

But, eventually, I got it. Just in time for the first time the Hale-Bop was starting to be visible. I set it up in our yard and learned how to perfectly walk across our yard without setting off the motion sensor for the light above our driveway. I twisted all the nobs, I attempted to comprehend the user's manual, and I figured out where it would be the clearest... only to never be able to get a great image from the telescope.

I thought it was just me being a dumb kid, but my dad couldn't figure it out either. It was probably, most likely, a combination of actually being broken right out of the box, not being meant for stargazing, and of just stupid shoddy construction. But we tried our best to make it work. There was a lot of "Is THAT it?" "No, that's a star." "How about now?" "No, that's a satellite." "How about now?" "That's a smudge from your finger."

Eventually, a year later when Hale-Bopp was at its brightest, we had pulled the telescope out so much that we were able to get minimal results. We were able to find Hale-Bopp with the telescope and see it as a shaky blurry ball until it moved out of view. It was so slightly impressive, that we had other family members come over to our house to view Hale-Bop and eat slice-and-bake Easter sugar cookies. Which, to be fair, is a much nicer memory to have compared to how most people hear "Hale-Bopp" and either go, "Is that another name for Halley's Comet?" or "That's the Heaven's Gate thing, isn't it?"

I think the only reason why I knew the phrase "Heaven's Gate" was due to Saturday Night Live. I don't think, as a child, I even realized that people had actually died at the time. Did SNL do those jokes after the deaths? I have a feeling at least the fake KEDS commercial they did was after the deaths. Yeesh. Edgy?

As I said, that was barely on my radar- my focus was on the slightly impressive comet itself. I wanted to see what a giant hurtling ball of ice in a vacuum looked like up close! All I saw was a shaky ball of light that was slightly bigger than all the other shaky balls of light in the telescope than to the naked eye. I wanted to see the damn sodium tail and be able to go, "Yup, that's definitely a tail made out of sodium!" by looking in the telescope.

How was I ever going to protect my loved ones from an alien invasion if I could only just barely tell one shaky blob of light from the next? My sense of reality was clearly shaky from the beginning.

I might still be bitter about that telescope. Also, I'm now wondering if my parents still have it.

Also? I'll be reading Contact for the first time this March. I don't know how I let the book go unread this long. Shame on me.