Alienation: Welcome to My Nightmare

My next door neighbor recently mentioned how much he was looking forward to the new movie, Fourth Kind, and wondered if I would join him in seeing it. I politely declined.

There is a new television series called V and whenever there’s a commercial for it I quickly change the channel. I have no intention of seeing it, nor did I see the original 1980s series that it is based on.

Both the movie and the TV series feature the story of aliens on earth, and that creeps me out. You see, I have had a recurring nightmare ever since childhood of being visited by aliens from another world. Each nightmare is consistently the same and goes like this:

I am asleep in my bed when a bright pulsating light starts shining through the drapes of my bedroom window. I groggily get out of bed, open the drapes, and see several space vehicles of various neon colors silently hovering outside my house. A few of them swiftly trade places with each other except for the mothership, which slowly starts to maneuver toward me, it’s bright purple and blue lights strobing faster and faster.

There is no sound at first, but as the mothership zeroes in on me I begin to hear a low throbbing hum. It gets louder and louder as the purple-blue lights start to envelop me. The other ships start zooming around and around in confusing patterns as I feel myself drawn into the mothership, which is now emitting a piercing high-pitched white noise. I’m being pulled into the ship against my will and scream at the top of my lungs.

“No! No! No . . .”

Then I wake up in cold sweat, safely in bed. I had this dream often as a child, and its occurrence increased when I was in college, then tapered off in middle age. But every now and then it comes back with a vengeance. In fact, I dreamed it last week and woke up screaming. My cat, who usually sleeps in another room, came running into my room and jumped on top of my bed, as if to check up on me. He ended up spending the rest of the night at my feet. (Don’t laugh. This really happened.)

I have no idea what this recurring dream means. All I know is that when it occurs, it’s terrifying. I suppose the whole “aliens and spaceships” motif is a symbol for something, but I have never bothered to analyze it. Perhaps I am too scared to even think about it.

“Maybe you were abducted by aliens once,” suggested a good friend of mine. “Do you have any unexplained scars?” He was serious.

Stop right there. I do not for a moment believe in alien abduction, nor do I believe in UFOs. That’s only science-fiction entertainment. So why have these dreams haunted me all my life?

I am open to ideas and interpretations from my readers.