Anger concluded

Now, this brings me back to an earlier point in my story. Anger can be very liberating and a very powerful force. I’ve faced people down who tried to make me angry on purpose just to get at what was within, and truth be told I don’t like to get angry. But Jill’s quick decision and subsequent dismissal of myself and my need was all it took.

I had the normal reaction. I and my friend ranted a while, appalled at Jill’s bent. Didn’t she listen when we had told her we’d done things together? We marveled.  And that worked to steer me away from being too angry for a little while. But my friend had to go to sleep sooner or later, and so I was soon left to my own seething thoughts.

It was like a window opened in the back of my mind, and all of that light which used to surround the bus in my nightmares streamed forth. I remembered the dolls, my terror, and the years of loneliness and fear that still haven’t left me today. I remembered reading an article about how many abductees , especially those that have dealt with Greys, report stories almost identical to mine. And in that moment I realized those weren’t dreams. They were nightmares, yes. But of the waking kind.

A whole new understanding of my past fell into place. I did remember, to some extent. It just wasn’t what I hoped to remember.

So I told Jill what I remembered. I told her about Jennifer, my incubus, and most importantly the bright lights. Her tune changed after that.. she said she wished she could put me under hypnosis, to see if Jennifer’s birth was real, and to see what else I could remember. The three of us began to make plans on coming to her – she lived in Louisiana – to see what we could do.

And then, unfortunately, Jill took a paranoid turn on us. Before it was over, she was accusing my friend of sending squirrels to attack her. (I kid you not. Squirrels.) And there went another researcher.

But even so, I had made progress. Glorious progress . I knew about the soul snatchers now. Some of the information my guides had told me as a child was confirmed as well. I could go on feeling like I was leading a double and triple life – because chances are I was. And even though I didn’t get “deprogrammed” or hypnotized, I did get some information and a step to some answers.

I’ve since met other researchers, one of which was with MUFON. The MUFON researcher never took my story seriously and I soon had to separate myself from that environment, as it was a drain of money I just didn’t have. The other researcher went the way of Jill and the others before her: his life went to hell. But at least he didn’t go crazy. I’ve just realized researchers are fragile things. If I get too close their worlds go boom. So I don’t get too close anymore.

Instead, I am sometimes my own researcher. I owe Jill for pointing me in the right direction when no one else would. And I thank her for it.

The Anger

I had already been turned away by a lot of researchers. One told me point blank that I wouldn't be able to tell him anything new for another book and he didn't need me. It was very frustrating because my information was all I had to offer in exchange for their help. I didn't have any money, being a single parent. Hell, I still don't have any money.

I just wanted to know the truth of why I was having my dreams, why it was some of my experiences matched alien abduction phenomenon, and how I could remember what I was supposed to have forgotten. I didn't want any healing. I wanted my memory back.

My dream world had transformed completely by this time. There were times I'd spend the entire night listening to music, sometimes music that wasn't released on the radio until a while later. There were times I dreamed of UFOs, of walking, of routine things involving fixing hyper-drive engines. My dreams, like my real life, had settled into a mature monotony seriously lacking zombies, Kodiak bears and dolls. I didn't miss the zombies and bears, but I hadn't seen Jenn since she turned 14 years old. I often wondered about her, although for all intents and purposes she was just a figment of my imagination. I no longer remembered the bright lights in the bus. Or being chased by my dolls.

My friend, who was in a similar boat, and I happened across a researcher who for the sake of this story I'll call Jill.  Jill was very friendly at first, and I was starting to have hope. The three of us would spend hours on the phone, where my friend and I would tell her about ourselves. 

But things just weren't meant to be I guess. "Oh, the music box! Not the music box!" she said to me when I told her about my nights listening to music.  In the course of three days, Jill made her decision. My friend was clearly an abductee, because her dreams were always based on spaceships and she never had anything bad to report. But it was plain to see that I had never been abducted by aliens.
 

So it was through Jill I learned what a MILAB was - a military abductee. I was, according to Jill, one of may average people in the world whose alien abduction experience was faked. I'd never been in a spaceship. I'd never seen an alien. It was all a lie.

Jill educated me further. Apparently the government has people trained to find abductees by reading their auras. Alien abductees have "holes" in their aura that's a dead give away. Abductees will then find themselves abducted by their own government as part of some grand scheme that no one understands but all can agree is happening. 

Furthermore, the government likes to watch for certain souls. Jill wasn't sure I was one of those souls. She just knew there was no way I was an abductee. AS a result, she no longer had an interest in working with me. She only wanted to work with my friend - the abductee in question.

That hurt and made me angry at the same time. (Although now that I think it through I realize wait a damn minute: if I've never been abducted by aliens then how did the government scout determine I was an alien abductee and induct me into the super secret uber program?)

Dolls2

Sleeping in that bus became a fight between me and my parents. I'd hang around in their house as long as I could, watching TV and trying to fall asleep on the couch. Then my father would announce it was time to go to bed, and I'd fight it as far as I could. I'd beg, and I'd plead, and I'd tell him straight up how afraid I was. He'd yell and threaten and eventually I had to walk across the dark back yard by myself to that dark, cold bus and wait in the night for the next nightmare.  When it came time to get up for school in the morning I was always so tired and worn out.

After a while, the dreams stopped.  My father eventually came into some money which he used to build rooms onto the trailer for my little brother and myself, giving my older brother the bus to himself. The events around me transformed from being haunted by dolls to being chased by men in dark suits, meetings in the night with people in uniform, and memories of helicopters. I had a nightly courtship with an incubus, missed my period for nine months after my menarche, and fell in love with the "dream adventures" I began to have.


Sure there were plenty of nights I was still chased by dolls, and even zombies. But with the coming of the men in the business suits - I called them FBI agents - came a sense of dream empowerment. I soon figured out I could do all sorts of things in my dreams. I also figured out that if I got angry enough, I could do all sorts of things in real life. Maybe I couldn't float pots and pans and hit my chasers in the face like I could in my dreams, but I could tell you things. And sense things. And I knew that when it came to pendulums and card-reading, I was the child who was taking after her father.

In the dream world I had a daughter who looked just like her incubus father - pale and golden. I named her Jennifer, after King Arthur's Guinevere, because that means "White." My dreams molded again to me stealing Jenn from an on shop nursery and being chased by a giant kodiak bear again and again. I wanted my daughter back. I soon learned a healthy respect and fear of bears... to top off my other fears I had gained through the years.

Through all of this, I also learned to speak to "my spirit guides". I didn't know who they were: I didn't try to give them faces of famous dead people like so man people do. If they were Red, like myself, that was fine. If they weren't, that was fine, too. All I knew was they'd tell me things, like when to take a walk down a road so I could find that lost kitten who needed my help. Or when to take a walk at night to "meet with the fairies" - meetings I don't remember if I had them at all. They reassured me when the bullying was too much, they told me of this great destiny I had. They told me they couldn't tell me what it was exactly because if I knew, "I would refuse to accept it."

The nightmares at the bus door were all but forgotten by then.

I'd slip off into the woods to talk to them, to vent, and relied on the blowing wind as their answer. My entire waking world had grown to be far from mundane. All grown up as I am now I would say I probably had built the perfect escapism story, except for the physical confirmations I got time and time again. "Go this way and you'll find something," and I would. "Call so and so and this will happen." And it would.

"When you are in your 30's all of the things you are here for will begin to happen." I had to wait a long time for that one.

So much has happened since those days long ago; too much for me to put into this short story. I want to skip over the hard times, the good times, the fluffy times and go right into after I'd realized I wasn't dealing with fairies exactly, had grown to call my guides "The Fishbowl" and started seeking answers to why things were how they were around me in my life.  

Dolls

My older brother was given to doing weird things, and being his bus mate with only a thin wall of pressed board between us was a nightmare for one who tends to sleep lightly. Night after night I was kept awake to the Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and if I did tend to fall asleep I had vague, uncomfortable nightmares that left me exhausted in the morning.

"I'm doing an experiment," my brother told me loftily when I complained to him that I wasn't getting any sleep.

In the meantime, my dolls also seemed determined not to let me get any sleep. I was waking up to them in different positions than they were in when I went to bed. My brother confessed once to rearranging them on me one time as a joke, and although I knew this another part of me wasn't reassured. I stopped being able to cope with my room alone, because when I went in there even with my brother nowhere around the oppressive presence of something waiting to get me lingered in the air.

Then the nightmares took it up a notch - and I still remember the first one. I was awake in the room, and it was night, and I was sitting on the floor by my bed. Suddenly I got up and went to the door - my room was on the side with the revolving bus door - and I opened the door to look out. Suddenly this bright light enveloped everything and all I could do was cling to the door lever for dear life, screaming and crying in terror.

Night after night, it was the same dream. Sometimes instead of the horrible bright light, I'd dream of waking up in my bed... only it also wasn't my bed. There were gauze curtains everywhere and my dolls were standing around me going to cut me up and kill me. Or my dolls were coming for me from outside, and I had to keep that door closed against them.

I had dolls of all sizes and shapes, but the one I feared the most was what we'd call a my size doll. She was about the height of a tall two year old. I had named her Mariah, after an old song by the Browns.  Before it was over, I had taken to shutting her up in my toy chest and putting heavy things on top of it to keep her from getting out. It never seemed to work.

And the nightmares never carried past the opening of the door, my screaming terror. And I stopped being able to wake up and scream my way out of it.

I was a nervous wreck when it came to that bus, although I lived in it for many years to come.

When the pickups got real

 Growing up, my folks liked to watch a lot of documentaries about UFOs. It was of interest, I think, more to my father than my mother although she enjoyed the shows as well. As a child, I took it for granted I think... when my father would play "psychic cards" with my older brother and I, how he taught us to use the pendulum, or would talk for hours about things he had seen, done, and how the paranormal world worked. This was the norm for me.

The documentaries of then aren't really that different from now - except talk of what happened to people who made contact of the third kind (abductions) was rare. It was equally rare to talk about the horrors many people faced, from stolen babies to rape to painful experiments. Hell, it's almost as rare still today what with all of that drowned out by people preaching love and light from the same entities that do these frightening things.

So I'm a child of 11, or 12.. maybe younger... and it was my fervent hope to be picked up by one of these saucers. I didn't want to be on Earth - never felt like I fit in really and was bullied at school - and I saw the aliens as a means of escape. For a while I'd step out into my backyard and think as hard as I could, Here I am! Please come get me! And of course no one came.

It was hot weather - summertime I believe - when my mother stopped hanging clothes to look at the sky. I had been playing by the back porch and my older brother was hanging somewhere about. "Look!" my mother said to us, "There's a UFO!"

So we, all three, stopped and stared in the sky for a while. I didn't see it at first and when I did think I see it, it was nothing more than a grey dot in the distance that didn't seem to move. I was actually disappointed that it didn't come closer or wasn't, at least, close enough for me to see better detail.

After a while, my mother got bored and went back inside. My older brother had gotten bored and wandered off a long time ago. It was only me standing there, staring at the sky, hoping. After a while I gave up, too. I can't remember if I saw the UFO wink out of sight or not.

The incident was forgotten over the next year or so. We were a poor family - what with the new fishing laws squeezing the already-thin wallets of generation shrimpers like my father - and real life seemed so much more important. Our living conditions were changing - we had gone from living in a converted church bus my father had bought when our trailer was repossessed to a one bedroom trailer with the church bus stowed in the far back of our acre yard. My little brother was getting too old to sleep with my parents, so Dad converted the church bus again into a two bedroom suite for me and my older brother. My little brother was given a space in the trailer with the parents.

I hated sleeping in that bus. I was caught between feelings of being abandoned by my parents, jealousy that my little brother got to be in the house, and insecurity over being so far away from Mom and Dad at night. I was already given to having night terrors. The situation didn't help me any more.

But on a side note, my parents were doing the best they could. As I said before, we were very poor. We were probably lucky to get food on occasion, and I can remember my parents going hungry just so me and my brothers could have something to eat. They meant well by building that bedroom bus for my brother and me. They were providing as best they could.

It’s just that as a terrified child, I couldn’t understand all of that.

At first, right before being exiled to the back yard, things weren't as bad. I was always given to waking up screaming in the night, so much that my parents had stopped coming to my aide years ago when I was about five or so. I thought nothing of the reoccurring dreams I had of my dolls coming to life, always to come and hurt me. I would never have confessed, of course, that I was terrified of my Raggedy Anne doll. To be honest, I thought I had gotten the idea from a book I had read. The doll in that story would come to life, too. And, I thought, this only happened in dreams.

I hated to be alone, too. I always felt like I was being watched - unless I was in the woods. There I would find peace. But around the house I was jittery and always looking over my shoulder, especially when no one else was home. But I couldn't tell anyone how I felt. My parents had no patience for my insecurities, and I didn't have much in the way of friends.

My time in that back yard went from bad to worse in just a matter of weeks, it seems now that I think back on it.

When No One Believes You

The Cassandra Syndrome.

According to Wikipedia: The Cassandra metaphor (variously labelled the Cassandra 'syndrome', 'complex', 'phenomenon', 'predicament', 'dilemma', or 'curse') occurs when valid warnings or concerns are dismissed or disbelieved.

The term originates in Greek mythology. Cassandra was a daughter of Priam, the King of Troy. Struck by her beauty, Apollo provided her with the gift of prophecy, but when Cassandra refused Apollo's romantic advances, he placed a curse ensuring that nobody would believe her warnings. Cassandra was left with the knowledge of future events, but could neither alter these events nor convince others of the validity of her predictions.

The metaphor has been applied in a variety of contexts such as psychology, environmentalism, politics, science, cinema, the corporate world, and in philosophy, and has been in circulation since at least 1949 when French philosopher Gaston Bachelard coined the term 'Cassandra Complex' to refer to a belief that things could be known in advance.

At the time I began to look into this particular issue, I wasn't aware that the situation had a name. I posted a question to the Above Top Secret Forum because of mingling emotions: PMS had me and I was feeling all Cassandra and emo, I've always wondered why no one looks a this particular looming issue experiences face every day of their lives, and I wanted to see what others had to say so that I could compile a list of suggestions to help readers of this blog.

I wrote:

This isn't a post about me, really. I'm going to use my situation as an example because it's the best one I have. For the more dense readers out there, this is me suggesting a situation and posing a question *to you*.  As a result I'm going to mention things talked about here before. I'm hoping to discuss what it's like for everyone in this situation and maybe talk about ways each of us cope with it. I looked around a bit before deciding to start this thread and saw that no one really covers this, but it seems to me that this particular problem with being an adbuctee either by the military or by non-humans deserves more than a mere mention on occasion. It's a symptom of the problem that could use a band-aid, so that folks in this situation can concentrate more on solving the bigger problem.

So here I am; I've had some interesting experiences in my life, seen some things, woke up in the middle of things that folks wish I didn't remember. Things like that. When my husband and I first got together he was all about how he believed me and learning things. Four years later, things are different. And the other day he told me a funny story about how he confused someone at work by explaining to them how I was "delusional".

Which wasn't very funny to me... it kind of hurt actually.

Tell researchers your problem and they might, if you're lucky, talk to you long enough to get some information. Then they dump you like so much trash. Or you're told you're a cabal slave and to go away. (Really did happen to a friend of mine.) Or maybe you'll get lucky and find a researcher who will talk to you like a real person, but after a few months you figure out you're being blown off and strung along for some other agenda. (Hello, MUFON!) Go to forums like this one, hoping for some sort of comradarie, and you get blown off. "They're just dreams." And after a while you start waking up in the morning feeling like you're the only person in the whole world, because there just isn't anybody out there for you. And maybe you're better off in a cave someplace, living with bears.

Maybe part of the problem is a handler device to keep you from getting help. Maybe that's just paranoia talking. One thing you know for sure - you're not crazy. The stinking implant in your bird finger didn't get there all by itself. You aren't trying to get attention or convince someone to write a book about you... you just want to feel part of the pack as it were. And maybe get to talk about your situation, figure things out, find the truth hidden in the mess of your brain.

And okay, your personality doesn't mesh with mainstream society so you find yourself distancing yourself from people more and more - especially that MUFON lady who said you weren't "very bright" for not wanting to kill a harmless ladybug. The thing is, in the end you gotta find solace all alone even though connecting with others would be kind of nice. And there's no feeling like the emptiness you get when no one believes you, even those that claim they make it their business to... or your own mate, who used your story as a dating device and now has essentially abandoned you for the stinking SCA.

Now I think for you out there, this situation isn't always to such an extreme. But I'm sure there are those out there who know what I'm talking about. I don't have any advice for it. I keep a personal blog on the matter. I write it under an assumed name, I put information in there on the rare occasions I find time to collect it, and I put my story down, reread, assess, and try to figure things out. My blog is kind of all I have.  :-) But it's also been the most reliable method I've had for years.

How about the rest of you?

I got your standard expected answers, of course: negative people putting me down and belittling the experiences I purposefully did not elaborate upon. I also got, however, a plethora of fabulous responses that gave me some real good information I need.

The name of the condition for starters.

Many people talking about their own experiences - which allowed me to see how they cope, think and feel.

And naturally a lot of good replies with good advice that I want to share with you now.  So when you're feeling like Cassandra - all alone and surrounded by a close-minded world that spits on your life, keep and remember this list. It will help you, and some of it has helped me over the past 40 years.

1. Remember you're not the only one. Even if you have no one to talk to, that doesn't mean you're out and out delusional. If you're reading this blog, you have access to at least some parts of the internet. Do a websearch. You're bound to find out that others are out there, like stars in the darkness.
2. Ground and center. It's a very useful technique for clearing your head past your feelings to access the information and understand what is happening or has happened to you. With understanding can come a great degree of self confidence and reassurance. There are many ways to ground and center. Take a walk in the park, or a hot bath.  Write a journal, paint a picture, go for a relaxing drive. The point is to find  an activity that helps you to clear your mind and relax. 
3. Meditate. I personally associate meditation with grounding and centering because it's a focused activity that requires you to clear your mind and relax. I can also vouche that weekly meditation at least helps to level out your emotions so that you can find better self-control, which is also essential to understanding your situation and not jumping to conclusions.
4. Find someone to talk to that will at least listen if not relate This is probably the most popular method, and whether you're an alien abductee or a shell-shocked war veteran it also is a very effective one. *Contrary to popular belief, your confident does not need to have experienced the same or similar things.* I've worked on Vietnam veteran projects, talked to counselors, and helped a lot of friends through things I could never understand simply by listening so I'm sure of what I say here. What's important is your confident empathsizes, communicates, doesn't ridicule in a thoughtless or mean manner (joking around is great), and is someone you can trust to tell things to. The act of being able to talk it out is what you need, not a clique.
5. Keep confidence in yourself and where you stand. There may be times that you wibble. There may be other times that you wobble. But so long as you know you know your truth, you'll have the kind of faith religious place great stock in. That sort of faith can move mountains, they say.