Dreams

I've had a dream about a tree for years. At first, it was all by itself, floating in the sky with the milky way above it. Then, the tree was rooted on a solid rock, surrounded by water. When I grew older, I saw the tree with more clarity. The rock turned red.

Before that dream made sense, I had some weird dreams and weirder things happened.

When I was six, I had a dream about a man at the foot of my bed. I didn't know it was a man, it was more like a shadowy figure but I assumed it was a man. I drew a picture of it and hid it from my mom.

I stared at this picture often. I called this figure "the gray man" and sometimes had dreams about the drawing itself.

After the first gray man dream I slept with a night light. It made me feel better but it didn't stop me from having dreams. I dreamt of the tree more and more. Now there was a single wooden chair under the tree, sitting on the beach of the small island, surrounded by water and stars.

I loved this tree, it made me feel safe. I tried to draw it and paint it but never could capture it

One night I had a dream I was trying to drive home but someone or something else kept turning the wheel. I was nearly home when I crashed into my neighbor's swimming pool. I woke up in bed and realized my clothes were soaked and there were puddles leading outside. Weirdest of all: My car was in my neighbor's pool!

Luckily the car on its last legs and lucky for me there wasn't that much water in my lungs. I went to the hospital and they said there was some but I guess it could've been a lot worse.

I was sleep-driving! The Inquirer did a story about me. It's weird to be famous for something so silly!

I took a break from driving and took a bus to visit Dr. Ben Yakita, a sleep doctor who said my sleepwalking could be caused by a whole variety of factors and that it might take years to identify the cause but that there are a few things I can do right now like tie myself up in bed. I'm not going to tie myself up! Dr. Ben gave me some pamphlets to read and said I could schedule a sleep study.

I was watching the sci/fi comedy Galaxy Quest when I saw the tree from my dream. The scene was shot in the desert. I looked up the location and knew instantly I had to go to Moab, Utah. I knew where my tree was. I bought a cheap ticket to Vegas and rented a car.

The whole drive there I thought about the image I'd been dreaming about for longer than I can remember. A large curved tree jutting out of crumbling red rock. A juniper tree.

I'd had the dream many times before, sometimes I dreamed only of the roots, the trunk, a branch, or the nearby canyon. But it was more or less the same dream. One who doesn't analyze their dreams has the luxury that those dreams have not come true. Many of my dreams have turned out to be memories so I'm forced to take each one seriously. This first dream, however, was not a sleep walk, it was a genuine dream, about a place that was real.

I went to Utah and brought my camcorder. I rented a car in Vegas and got as far as Bryce Canyon when I saw something else from my dream. I was searching for a kitchy roadside shop to get Veronica some sort of trinket. I thought maybe a snowglobe with an American Eagle or some Cowboy Boots shaped candles. She gets a kick out of that sort of thing. But I was looking for a rest stop when I saw something I'd seen before. A rock formation.

Jagged peaks, shaped like a row of chimneys. As soon as I noticed them I also noticed other people pulled over on the side of the road, taking pictures. Of what? I pulled over and got out with my camcorder. The tape has since disappeared but here is a screen shot of what I videoed for about fifteen seconds before it disappeared over the canyon. A silver disc-shaped object that was flying or hovering above the ground.

People always ask how high off the ground but it's difficult to judge distance when you're afraid. I've heard people say it looks low enough in the photo that it's casting a shadow on the rock just below but I think it's much higher (and larger) than that. I think it was huge and quite far away. It moved faster than a hummingbird but it was absolutely silent. It was gone just as fast as it was there.

Trust me, it looked fake to me, too. This picture doesn't do it justice but it still was weird and unreal. You should've seen the way it moved! My picture ended up in an news story, dozens of people had seen it that day. I was unable to find a tape of the news story.

Later that night I was walking in the woods and I saw multiple lights in the sky. One was green and the other was violet and they blinked as they zoomed around and disappeared after about a minute or so. I didn't have a camera with me but this was far more impressive than the disc.

Here is more recent footage (that I didn't shoot) that looks exactly like what I saw.

I went to a hotel that night and swore someone was in my room while I tried to sleep. I turned on the lights several times but no one was there. In the morning all the locks on the hotel room door were unlocked. I swear they were locked when I went to bed. I couldn't tell if I'd sleepwalked or if someone had entered while I slept.

I'd had quite a weekend! I'd seen enough. I didn't made it to Moab to see the tree. I'll have to go back.

I flew home and packed for a business trip.

In the morning I woke from a dream where I was trapped in an advanced Algebra class but I hadn't studied.

The night before, I'd left out my clothes for the following day and in the morning the outfit was nowhere to be found. I searched the house til I found my clothes, folded, in the unfinished basement closet under a heavy oak bench. You'd have to lift and move it to get the clothes under there and keep them folded just so. It would be no easy task, it's full of books.

I was so distracted by the clothes I didn't notice my sketch paper til the following day. I keep a small stack of paper next to my bed, but it was blank when I went to bed. In the morning there were strange markings written in red ink on the top sheet. My red marker was missing and there were four sheets of paper and now there were three.

I couldn't make sense of this. If it was sleepwalking it wouldn't be the first time.

I later found the red marker on the floor in the back seat of my car along with two items that I've never seen before: a roll of yellow emergency tape and a tire iron.

I kept all this to myself because I was already getting weird reactions from the people I'd told about the objects I'd seen in the sky. Not everyone thought it was neat like me and those folks on the side of the road.

"Did you have to give your real name to channel six?" My neighbor asked me.

I thought getting on the news meant I'd get more attention but my neighbors thought differently.

One morning there were dozens of crushed soda cans on my porch. I though a homeless man had dumped them or something but when I look back it seemed like a message.

Not nearly as weird as what I found on my phone. I was looking at my recent photos and I saw two photos I didn't take. They were taken at four in the morning. Lord knows where.

These photos were taken by my phone at 4:03am and 4:32am, respectively. I don't have the slightest clue where these woods are. I swear I've never dreamed about these trees.

My phone was on me the following morning. I didn't notice them til a day or two later but my point is my phone wasn't missing. Whoever took the pictures returned my phone to my bedside before i woke up.

A yellow envelope came in the mail with no return address. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper folded up. On it, written in red marker, was gibberish. That's what I thought at first, but I didn't know what to make of it. I showed it to my wife and she said it was an equation. I've shown it to mathematicians at CalTech and MIT and no one really knows what the heck it is. Dr. Bryan Dennison a physicist at the University of Nebraska says this would be impossible to solve because it is incomplete. He says the part at the bottom right is missing something.