I’ve been hallucinating again. Oh, it’s not the first time. Again the visions are strange, eerie, a little frightening and a little fun.
I remember the first time (or rather, the first time that I remember) was back when I 
was about 33. I was married at the time and suddenly, when I’d wake up in the morning my spouse (now best friend) would tell me strange tales of nocturnal roamings and conversations. I’d sit up in bed, eyes open yet fully asleep and have phantom conversations with beings who weren’t there. Or I’d get up in the night and wander around the house, getting lost in the living room or kitchen and calling for someone to find me.
All of this was a complete surprise to me. I’d wake with no recollection whatsoever. I admit, I was a little disturbed. I was hearing of times that my body was moving, that I was speaking when I wasn’t particularly present. Was I going crazy? Were the fragmented pieces of my soul congealing into more than one separate personality? Or was I being taken over by some demon entity that directed my thoughts and actions when I was at my weakest?
E was not concerned. She thought it was kind of cute. And besides, new-ager that she was, she thought there was just as good a chance that I was simply being visited by light creatures from some distant universe. What fun!
There were also nights when my vivd dreams drove my body into action. I remember E waking me one night in the middle of one of those adventures. ‘Goose,’ she said, gently shaking me. ‘Goose!’ now a little more vigorously, ‘wake up!’ . I came-to in the bed, up on all fours, my pillow on the floor and the bedsheets pulled from beneath me.
E. had chosen to wake me because I was disturbing her sleep and she had a big day on tap. I had been babbling, then gotten up on my hands and knees and started digging 
through the bed linen, calling, ‘E! E! Where are your titties? Where are your titties?’
When she told me this I had a flash of what was in my mind at the moment and it was a vivid but nonsensical vision of me on top of her, searching all over her torso for breasts that had somehow mysteriously vanished. If not for having disturbed E’s sleep, it would have been a marvelous dream.
Then came the time when I remembered. It was a rainy spring night in Georgia, the crash of raindrops into the heavy vegetation around our secluded house lulling me to sleep. I woke in the night and sat up in bed to see a tall man in a long coat standing near the foot of the bed. He was looking at me.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘You are the one?’ he asked in a deep voice like rocks tumbling in a river.
‘Yes.’ I replied. He nodded slowly, then turned to his left and walked through the wall and out of the bedroom.
‘Honey,’ said E, touching my arm. ‘Honey, wake up and go back to sleep.’
But I couldn’t. I was haunted by the vision of what had just happened. I got up and spent the rest of the night feeding the wood stove in the living room and drinking tea. Though I wasn’t afraid at the time, I was now glancing around the room and out the window every few minutes to be sure nobody was there.
This was getting out of hand. I mean, I love the weird and bizarre. You know that. But this was starting to feel like a very dark horror movie. I decided to go to the doctor.
After I told her my concern, she did her usual exam and asked a few questions about drug and alcohol use. Then she took out her prescription pad. ‘Remember that beta blocker I switched you to last month?’ she asked. ‘I want you to quit taking it and try this.’
Though I am healthy as a mule, I do have a hideous case of largely genetic (my Mom’s side of the family) hypertension. My blood pressure seems to have a mind of its own. I started getting medicated in my mid-twenties and occasionally went through drug adjustments as newer treatments became available or when my current prescription ceased to do the job. My doctor had switched me to a new pill on my last visit.
‘Is that what’s causing it?’ I asked. 
‘I don’t know.’ she said, continuing to write, ‘Probably. Sometimes people go through a short period when their dreams become more vivid at the start of taking those kinds of drugs. You usually adjust quickly and it stops. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on with you, but let’s move to a different class of drug and see if the sleepwalking doesn’t stop.’
After that I had a couple of more sitting-up-in-bed-talking events that were mildly entertaining to E . . . then it stopped. My soul sighed in relief.
In the years that followed, I had occasional one or two night episodes where I’d see strangers in the bedroom, would sometimes sit up or reach out to them . . . then wake to discover 
nobody there. Remember I was living with a trance-channeling mystic who truly believed she was 
descended from aliens. Remember as well that this was about the time Whitley Schreiber’s book, Communion – about alien visitation and abduction – was popular. E and I decided that I had just been chosen by the space beings for some purpose (and this was a good thing) and they’d occasionally be visiting me in the night. Nothing to worry about. I awaited my eminent abduction and anal probing.
E. and I split up and I moved to California and cavorted with the boys. I bought a condo in Long Beach and moved Robert #1 in. I continued to rarely have visits. I remember one in that condo. Robert was out of town and I was
sleeping alone in that wonderful high ceilinged bedroom we shared. In my sleep I heard a low buzzing, a rhythmic slapping of metal on metal.
I opened my eyes and leaned up on my elbow. There was fog in my room. Actually more of a cloud hovering around the floor. It was just like a cheesy Hollywood movie. And there, at the lower corner of the bed stood a cluster of little people. They were about three to four feet tall and were mostly silver. Their silverness seemed to be a shiny fabric of some kind stretched over their humanoid bodies. Their heads were long and conical. If you were to take an oval human head and alter the top of it to reach six inches higher and end in a rounded point, that’s what they had. I remember black-red areas on either side — like dark glasses where eyes might be.
I was not frightened. Neither were they. I didn’t try to talk to them and received no communication from them. They seemed to turn to each other and converse, but I heard no voices, just the incessant buzzing. I yawned, took another look, closed my eyes and went back to sleep. Somehow . . . Somehow, I remembered bits of this in the morning. I lay awake in bed, quiet and still trying to connect the dots. Soon the whole incident, or what I believe to be the whole incident came back to me. Maybe E. was right. Maybe I was being visited.
But then nothing happened. Once again, my phantoms evaporated and I went on living my mundane life.
Fast forward about eight years. I’m living with Bob. I’m exhausted. I mean, some afternoons I can barely keep my head up. I hit this place where a near druggy stupor takes over. I catch myself dozing off during phone calls and even, for a second, 
behind the wheel. I decided to do a little investigation.
I took my video camera, set it on Black and White and flipped the infra red night vision switch. I set it on a tripod pointed at my side of the bed, turned it on and turned in for the night. The next day I had 90 minutes of footage of me ‘sleeping.’ That’s in quotes because what I saw the next day was my eyes, shining rat like in the infra red light, opening and closing opening and closing. Over and over again, I’d stir, sit up, lean on an elbow, gaze off into the room and mouth a word or two. For all the world it looked as if I was having a conversation with someone who didn’t seem to be there. And, again, I had no recollection of this when I woke the next morning.
I called my doctor and insisted I have a sleep study. I wanted to know what was going on.
Today, sleep studies are easy. You just swing by the sleep lab, pick up the 
equipment take it home, hook it up, sleep and return it the next day. Back then, the study was almost always done during an overnight visit to the hospital or to an independent sleep lab. At Grossmont hospital at 10 p.m., a technician attached about 30 electrodes all over my head and body all the way down to my waist. He led me to a crude hospital bed in a big cold room and told me to lay down and go through my normal sleep 
routine. I thought, no way I’m gonna sleep with all this hardware on. But somehow, after a few minutes, I was gone.
And then the technician was back. ‘How’d I do?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘You’ll need to see your doctor for the interpretation . . . but I’ll tell you: you woke up a lot.’
‘Did I talk or sit up or anything?’
‘No; it was more like you’d stop breathing and startle awake for an instant and then go right back to sleep.’
A few days later I met with the specialists who told me I was waking up on average about 36 times an hour. ‘I don’t believe you’re ever making into REM sleep at all, ‘ he said. ‘You have classic sleep apnea.’
‘You mean snoring?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s part of it. But it’s mostly about your throat closing up as it relaxes, shutting off your ability to breathe. Your body will stand it for a minute or two but then will go into panic mode, startle you awake to take a breath.’
‘Geeze . . . you’d think my spouse would have mentioned that.’
‘She didn’t?’
‘She’s a he, and no, he didn’t. I mean he’s complained a time or two about my snoring, but . . ‘
‘He must be a very hard sleeper . . . or perhaps a snorer himself?’
‘A hard sleeper, yes . . . not a snorer, though.’
He sent me to a medical supply house that specialized in respiratory devices. I was fitted for a CPAP mask and machine and told to sleep with it every night. CPAP stands for Continuous Pulmonary Air Pressure. It’s basically an air pump that compresses air from the room where you sleep and pumps it through a mask into your nose and/or mouth at a constant pressure which fills your throat and keeps it from closing in on itself as you relax.
I was sure I’d never sleep with the thing . . . but, gosh darn-it, I had no problem. And immediately, I started to feel better. I woke refreshed, happier, more energetic. Sometimes I still got sleepy in the afternoon . . . but not that horrible drugged out sleepy I’d been experiencing. Best of all, I started dreaming again: my wild adventure dreams, as much fun as an amusement park, where I was the hero and always was victorious. I had been given a new life. Really.
Which brings me up to today. I’ve slept with that machine for almost 5 years. I take it with me when I travel, on cruise ships and airplanes. Screeners at the airport know what it is and it’s not a problem. But here, in the last 2 months, I’ve begun to have visitors again.
This time, they’re just . . . people. Sometimes very big people, sometimes very striking people, sometimes with wild hair and scraggly beards. But . . . people.
I was in Lafayette, Louisiana a couple of weeks ago, in Cajun country. I was 
sleeping at a La Quinta Inn — hardly a haunted hotel. I stirred awake and cracked my eyes. There was someone in the bed next to me. Who could that be, I thought. Bob? No; we don’t sleep together anymore and I’m out of town . . . Someone I met?. . .where did I go tonight? Nowhere. I went nowhere. It’s nobody I brought here . . .I blinked. And the person laying next to me was suddenly out of the bed, leaning next to it, staring at me. He had long, curly hair and a beard. He was both rough looking and somehow mystical. Suddenly, he was in the same stooped pose, but across the room, away from the bed. I sat up. Turned on the light. Where he had ended up, across the room, was a chair. Had I just taken this dark chair and in my half dreaming state transformed it into a person? I don’t know.
There have been several other incidents. Funny. I never am scared. I see the person . . . oh, they’re always male . . . and I wonder who they are and why they’re here . . . but I’m not afraid of them. It’s very strange.
I’ve actually awakened some mornings, remembering a visit and wondering if I’m getting ready to go over to the other side. Are these the guides who will lead me through the tunnel of light? I always expected they’d be loved ones who passed on before me. These are strangers.
One more tale, probably unrelated but equally strange and involving sleep. It has to do with Bob’s mother, who I adored. She was diagnosed with a very advanced case of lung cancer. No, she was not a smoker . . . but her husband was. They gave her three months to live. We moved her in with us and she lasted six. It was a gift, too, because she never really had that awful painful deathlike life of a lingering cancer patient. She was active, alive, laughing in and relatively good shape up until 2 or 3 days before she died. Really; people didn’t even realize she was sick. But she was. And she died there in our front bedroom, in the bedroom where I now sleep on the floor.
The day she died we had a house full of people. Her grandkids, Joshua and Nathan were there and so was Bob’s daughter. We did what you do when someone dies, made calls, cried, tried to think about arrangements. We were up late. But finally, we all just collapsed and went to sleep.
The next morning, I was up and out, taking care of details. My nose itched. It was a dull but nagging thing. Finally, I went into the bathroom and blew it. Out came all of this black stuff . . . like soot. I blew again and more came out. It was as if I’d been sitting too close to a fire for too long. I came out of the bathroom and asked the others if they had the same thing. Nobody knew, but they all went and blew. And one after another, they came out of the bathroom with a tissue covered in this black sooty mess.
Then we started to remember. In the wee hours of the night, the fire alarm had gone
off. I remember it. So does Bob. We both woke up. I got out of bed and noticed that the whole house was once again blanketed with a low hanging fog. I walked out of the bedroom, past the shrieking fire alarm, into the living room where Joshua and Nathan were sleeping. There, I saw Josh sitting up, looking around at the fog, Nathan lay next to him, fast asleep. Joshua looked at me . . and then lay back down . The smoke alarm stopped . . . and I went back to the bedroom and back to sleep.
What happened?? Five people are awakened in the night by a shrieking fire alarm. Several of them open their eyes and notice that the house is filled with smoke. And then they all lay down and go back to sleep? What’s up with that??
After we’d pieced the event together, we were all a little chilled. It was so strange. But then we decided that it was Nanna telling us one more time that she loved us, saying goodbye. I accepted that explanation then, and accept it now . . . but I wonder wonder wonder: what in the world is going on around me when I sleep?
Got any ideas? Let me know, ok. . .