Astral Realm Files: A UFO Memory?

Category: Meditation, dreams, recovered memory, paintings
Location:Santa Cruz, California and Eugene,Oregon
Date: approximately 1972 and 1998


I was meditating in my bedroom in Oregon. Not a deep state, pretty light, but definitely in that highly relaxed, open mode. For some reason, I kept looking up at the painting that was resting on top of the armoire. It was a painting I had done a few years earlier; an impressionistic landscape, all blues and a bit of green, with a hint of silver/white. A night time scene. It reminded me of the mountains and places around Santa Cruz, California, where I lived for a awhile as a teenager, with my dad.

So I'm looking at the painting, and feeling good; remembering, in particular, the time my dad, his ex-wife, my brother and sister from that marriage, all went camping by a river in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was great. We were all happy, and I remember we were all standing right by the water's edge for some reason, at night. It was very bright, and very cold, but it didn't seem to matter. I remembered that it literally seemed as if the rushing, cold water was singing. In fact, I had mentioned that, and my father had said something about how water carries sound. Yet no one else heard it.
I remember looking up at the fantastic night sky, and all the stars; it was exhilarating.

That was all a true memory. So there I am, on my bed many years later, reliving this wonderful moment that really happened. (I was practicing at the time with various types and levels of meditation; this one was on focusing on a memory, details, emotions, as real and alive as right now.) I was going into myself and occasionally looking at the painting. Back and forth.

Suddenly, as I'm back there at the river's edge, with my father and the others, and see myself looking up at the sky, the memory becomes even more real. I really am right there, and I'm intently watching a star that has my attention. I'm both me, now, and me, back then. Me, as an adult woman, and me, as a teenager. I'm in two places at once. I think to myself "I don't remember any star," and keep watching. Suddenly, the star moves! It just zips off, moves around, very fast, very bright.

This scares me. I say to myself in a panic "I don't remember anything like that!" And I'm struggling to get out of there. Then I hear a voice: it tells me I do remember that, that I know I remember that, and to go with it, not to lose it. But I can't; I get too scared and so snap myself out of it.


(image source: Picture Detail (public domain image)