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.

Space Crafts, Part Two: Solar Eclipse of the Heart

Previously In Space: Introduction and Part One

 Towards the end of the year when I was in second grade, all the teachers suddenly realized that there was going to be a pretty impressive solar eclipse over the Chicago area on an actual school day. During May! Which meant it might not be snowing and overcast on that day!

I think they realized this about two days before it happened.

This is NOT an impressive eclipse.

It was SO EXCITING, though. They decided to pair off grades so that the younger three grades were all assisted by the older three grades in the school. Meaning that the second grade and fifth grade combo was the one that had its act together. And what were we doing in these paired off groups? Mostly, we were being repeatedly told "NEVER STARE AT THE SUN DIRECTLY!" by various authority figures.

But in-between lectures, we were making pinhole projectors with old boxes and sun visors out of paper plates. If they could've figured out a way to mix macaroni into the equation, I'm sure they would've.

One 2nd grader and one 5th grader to each pinhole projector. With way too little time to get them ready while still doing actual school work in those days. Some of it felt like the beginning of a reality competition show (although, I don't think I had seen any at that point in time. The 90s were a long time ago, apparently). Most of my memories of it just seem to be of way too many children in way too small of a classroom, realizing that 5th graders were sweatier and smellier than the average person (hurray for schools without air conditioning!), and the sound of corrugated cardboard being cut with safety scissors for an eternity while several different teachers tried desperately to shout over the noise to briefly educate us on what an eclipse was, what to expect, and how lucky we were to have this experience. Because the next eclipse this impressive wouldn't be until 2012! In a whole different century! We'd be so old by then!

That night, all my dreams were of how I thought the total eclipse would go down.  In one dream, I imagined that as the moon slowly moved in front of the sun, the sky would rapidly go through the color changes of sunset as the sun was blocked from us. I imagine birds ceasing to sing, people in their cars pulling over to watch, and the faint sound of stone against stone because I thought the moon would make a noise like that(despite never having made a noise when moving in the sky ever before).

(A year later, I'd see the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" finale of The Simpsons and go, "THAT's what an eclipse should be like!" as Mr. Burns blocked out the sun over Springfield.)

And then... the day came. And was actually a nice day with great weather. The whole school went out into the soccer field and set up their pinhole projectors and placed their paper plate visors on their heads. Even more teachers were shouting "DO NOT STARE AT THE SUN!" over and over again, convinced that we'd defy them despite how, you know, it hurts to stare at the sun anyway.

While never ceasing to remind us not to look at the sun, the teachers almost forgot to tell us how to use the pinhole projectors. Possibly because most of them didn't really know, having never done them before (why would they?). We were all looking at each other's projectors, seeing how the pinholes (made by scissors or pencils, depending on which class you were in) were filtering the light. Some kids really had strayed from the directions and were stuck to roaming the field to look at other projectors. My fifth grader and I had done ours perfectly. For once in my life, I did not make the disaster project! I don't think the fifth grader had much to do with that.

Then, it started. We looked down at the bottom of our pinhole projectors and watched in wonder as the teeny little circle of light on the bottom of the projector slowly began to look like it had a bite taken out of it. Very sloooooooooooooowly. And then, before you noticed, the smaller dark circle was covering up more than half of the sun. And we stood in amazement as... it became not-quite-as-dark as a partly cloudy day. Not quite the afternoon sunset I had dreamt of.

The coolest part was, of course, when the little dark circle was completely in front of the big brighter circle. Total eclipse, bitches! Not really, though. Our teachers told us it was a total eclipse but you could still see a ring of the sun around the moon. When looking at the pinhole projectors, that is. If you even tried to look in the sky, there wasn't much to see. The moon wasn't even visible, if I remember correctly. It was pretty amazing for those few minutes, though. More because the pinhole projector seemed like a magical device than anything else, as we weren't able to look at the sun. I'm sure the film footage of it was amazing, though.

Picture borrowed from a site that was likely made in 1994

As the moon started to move away again, kids started to get antsy and the teachers were trying to get everyone to come back in to get back to class. My fifth grader abandoned me and our pinhole projector baby quickly to re-join her class. I carried it back up to my classroom, where I found my teacher collecting them for recycling, much to my horror. Why did she want to take my magical viewing machine made of cardboard?

She explained that there wasn't much use for a pinhole projector now that the eclipse had come and gone. I gave mine up, along with my fantasy of how dramatic the eclipse would be. And then gave up to let the day become just another day. A day when I made a craft project that wasn't a disaster, at least.

My Space Jam, Part One: Dad, Are You Space? Yes, Now We Are Family Again.

Click here to read the introduction to this series.

When I was five-years-old, my father marched me outside into our giant front yard early one summer night. The neighborhood we lived in was unincorporated, so there were no street lights. The sky was totally clear- dark blue with little sparkles slowly appearing as it got darker. I knew they were stars. I knew stars were in the sky and that the sun was a big star that came out during the day. But that was about all I had gleamed so far. Kindergarten was still three months away.

My dad pointed his giant hand to a section high in the sky, over our neighbor's massive trees. My head turning all the way up like Peanuts cartoon character as I tried to see where he was pointing.

"Do you see the ones that aren't so bright?" He asked me. I squinted then relaxed my eyes, noticing how many more appear as my eyes further adjusted to the darkness. Slowly, I started to see the difference in brightness and slight differences in color.

"Which ones?" I asked, trying to see where he was pointing. He was at least two feet taller than me at the time, throwing off the perspective of where he appeared to be pointing. A problem that still persists when we star gaze together, despite how I only need to wear high heels to be as tall as him now.

He told me to look for three stars that look bigger but not so bright. After a few minutes of searching, I found them. A triangle of dull blurry stars. One big and two so tiny I almost can't see them.

"Those are planets." He explained. I had no reference for this word. "We live on a planet," He elaborated when I ask what that was, "It's Earth. The world. Everything you see that isn't in the sky is on Earth" My five-year-old mind focused on how planet sounds like "plant" and I imagined that my neighborhood existed on a leaf of a giant potted ficus. My mind was blown.

My father continued, overwhelming my mind. He pointed to the big one "That one is called Venus. If we were on Venus, that's how Earth would look in the sky to us. That's how far away it is." My five-year-old brain was trying to bend its logic to make it so ficus plants became little circles of light when viewed from far away.

Then, he threw everything even more out of whack by explaining that the smaller one to the bottom, Jupiter, is actually much much bigger than Venus and Earth. It only looks so small because it's so far away. My mind had just decided that Earth and Venus must be the biggest ficus plants in existence and he immediately went and trampled the limits I had set on the universe by saying that Jupiter is so big that Earth would be ant-size in comparison.

"If those are planets, then what are the other stars?" I asked. Were they all planets? Were they all house plants sitting around and shining in a gigantic room? My interest was piqued, to say the least.

Months later, my kindergarten teacher would put up a long poster on the wall of our trailer-turned-classroom that was roughly our solar system at that time- finally giving me more of a reference and removing the ficus plants from my mental image of the celestial bodies.

The poster showed the nine recognized planets (as this was 1991/1992) but had them in the traditional order from the Sun. I remember the teacher explaining that, in reality, Pluto -which was a full-fledge planet at the time- was currently 8th furthest from the sun but that, most of the time, it was the 9th furthest. Apparently, between 1979 and 1991 (and probably all the way to 1999), no one really felt the need to make posters with Pluto and Neptune swapped, despite how they were for twenty friggin' years.

But by the time my kindergarten teacher put up that poster, I had already been exposed to a few 3-D solar system models and a globe or two. My "we live on a ficus plant" mental image had been corrected to a more "There are giant lines going across the Earth so we all know where we live" view. Although, again thanks to the "we don't need to buy whole new maps/globes/ect!" mentality of 1991 did lead to some confusion regarding how some maps of the world said "Russia" but most of them said U.S.S.R. over most of the eastern hemisphere. And the teachers just sort of... ignored it. So that there were still maps sporting the U.S.S.R in 1997. I swear this was a very well funded public school district.

I may have also been convinced that all the planets went around the sun just like the rings of Saturn went around it and at roughly the same pace, despite the difference in orbit size. Because 3-D solar system models can still be lacking in major details.

And then, there was the planetarium trip. As I mentioned, this was a pretty well-funded public school district and the high school had a planetarium that actually remains one of the nicer ones I've been to in my life. And almost every year, there was a trip to the high school's planetarium and it was amazing. Almost anything can be amazing if you give a booming voice over a P.A. system a bit of an echo while talking about the universe, mind you.

Finally, things started to make more sense. I knew why Venus was so bright and why Mars had been so dim despite being closer than Jupiter. I understood their movements through space a little bit more and how those translated into dots in the sky. And the last few bits of ficus-based theory were finally swept out of my mind, replaced with amazing balls of rock and gas and clouds.

And in that one little afternoon trip to the planetarium,  I also became obsessed with constellations. That night, I made my dad go stand in the yard with me again and I looked for the big and little dipper- knowing that if I just found the big one, I could then find the little one as well as the North Star. Of course, later on I would constantly forget which one contained the North Star, despite how I should've been able to take cues from, you know, which direction was NORTH. Usually, my dad would find Orion, as it would take me until my teens to be able to quickly find the belt pattern of the constellation. I still, to this day, cannot naturally find the Pleiades/Seven Sisters. I'm not the greatest as pattern recognition, it seems. But I damn well tried!

In the twenty plus years since, he and I have spent numerous evenings staring up into the sky looking for various celestial events. The internet has actually made it a tad more difficult, as it's very easy for someone to forward you an article that says "this awesome thing is happening TONIGHT!" and it turns out it actually happened like three years ago during a thunder storm. But we still try. Even when in different parts of the country, he'd make sure to send me an email so that we could share the experience despite not being near each other.

Every time, I'm reminded of that night when he pulled me outside in the dark to see a little triangle of dots in the sky and how my view of everything was changed from that moment on. How it expanded my imagination and knowledge all at once with just him wanting to make sure that I saw something as more than just dots in the sky and have me understand that it was something important and amazing. Make it so I never again looked up at the stars at just thought they were specks of nothing that didn't matter.

When I started to write this, I made sure to go searching for when that specific event happened. I knew it had to be 89-91, as I remember it being before I started school, but my memory was hazy. In doing so, I found the beautiful picture by Alan Dyer that is at the top of this post. Taken in Southern Wisconsin in June of 1991- not far off from how I remembered it looking in Northern Illinois. He has many other pictures on line, I really recommend taking a peek at the others at Amazing Sky. I also found only a handful of references for this specific event that happened in June of 1991, the one from the LA Times best matching my memory of how my father described it.

"Spell it! S-P...AACE. Space. Space!"

Watching the video footage of the meteorite explosion in Russia brought back a lot of odd feelings for me. When I was a kid, I was a space nut. Big time. Had the happy meal toys to prove it. Mostly because, as a small child, learning about space and planets made me feel like there was so much more I needed to find out about the universe and with every knew fact, I was both excited and terrified by now having that knowledge. Because there's so much about space where it's just basically, "Well, THIS terrifying and deadly thing could happen at any moment... but it hasn't happened yet so we're not going to worry about that except for maybe just watching to make sure nothing is coming our way."

I mean, tons of people in the Eastern Hemisphere were paying attention to the sky the past few days because they've been waiting to see the asteroid that was going to pass within 17,100 miles of Earth- a close shave for celestial bodies- during what would be night-time on that side of the planet (lucky dogs!). Yet this SUV-sized chunk of space dirt managed to make it through our atmosphere and cause a sonic boom that injured hundreds (the opposite of "lucky dogs"!) without much warning? SCARY!

AND AWESOME!

I'm so sorry for all those that were damaged by this freak of nature thing.

But my inner ten year old has been awoken by this event and I feel the need to start sharing stories from my space-nerd childhood before I lose them. I have most likely already forgotten more space-related facts than I can ever learn (I used to do my college assignments with the Science Channel playing in the background, and all the programming at the time either fell into the category of "space" or "dinosaurs"- sometimes they'd combine the two and talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.) so I better start making them remembered now.

When I started typing my stories down, I quickly realized that it was going to result in either a novella-length blog entry... or a series of smaller entries. So... stay tuned. And, yes, some of them are more sci-fi and aliens related than actually space exploration and science-based... but these are from my childhood and my imagination got in the way of hard facts quite frequently.

Part One will be up soon. In the meantime, I highly recommend reading Simon Clark's quick write-up of answers about the big important questions being asked in response to the Russian meteorite.

This Geek Is Thinkin' That ThinkGeek's Been Sneakin'...

... especially when an email from them is simply titled:

"ThinkGeek's in space. Space. Spaaace!"

And then I open it to see that they are selling inflatable Space Personality Cores.

I know I'm not the only one obsessed with the Space Core (wanna go to space) from Portal 2 (need to be in space), but I do think I'm, possibly, a little too fond of the Space Core (I'm the best as space).


To the point that I have a history of Facebook arguments that completely center around defending the Space Core (spell it S-P-ace. Space) as a presidential candidate.


No worries, dear human readers, I didn't officially vote for the Space Core (So much space. Need to see it all.) but I did vote for the candidate that best supports the Space Core's interests (Dad, are you space?).

In conclusion: Inflatable Space Cores for Christmas for EVERYONE!

(Except you. You get Wheatley.)