Hey-- this is for you, Mike C.

You see, I promised my friend-- writer of the Hidden Experience blog-- that I would post some of my own past experiences. Somehow I never quite got around to it, though...

Don't want to make a liar out of myself, now, do I?

His mentioning seeing a blue orb after a very strange dream prompted this memory post.

Abductees seem to have paranormal experiences in waves, like UFO flaps. A few days, weeks, months, or even a couple of years may go by of crazy occurrences and then suddenly the "well of weird" dries up for weeks, months, several years-- maybe even a decade.

1996 was one of my "weirdness wave" years. This was true for my husband as well-- but then he's also an abductee. Maybe they have 2 for 1 specials? Take one human, get a second human half off? I don't know-- but I'm guessing the convenience of having us together gets taken advantage of quite a bit. The benefit of it though is that we often witness the other's experiences-- either while having our own or just as an observer to the other. 1994 was the last wave before that, but after 1996 we had a decade of mostly dry spells.

One experience I had right before that extra long "dry spell" I had a telepathic communication sent to me in broad daylight, out of the blue, that basically said I wouldn't be seeing "Them" for a while-- it was okay, and it was expected-- but whoever sent the message was very upset about it and that part was conveyed too, and I bawled my eyes out for over an hour. I don't get telepathic messages while awake-- almost EVER-- unless it's at the beginning of an abduction or the end. This was different. Also? Given how upsetting abductions often are, you'd think I'd be pleased to have an extra long vacation. But no-- I cried like my heart was breaking. I have a theory about that I'll write about later.

So, 1996 had it's own intensity that wasn't matched until 2006. (You can read about those experiences by hitting my paranormal tag and going back to 2006. I wrote about those as they happened-- mostly.) Many things happened that year, and I wrote most of it down in a hand-written journal (before my right wrist gave out on me... those were the days.)

One strange thing was that my husband suddenly became obsessed with painting these HUGE paintings. All of them big enough to walk through the frame. He'd done a little painting or drawing before that year, but '96 was a bit different. He painted, and painted, and painted... All of his paintings had ONE particular thing in common: a blue glowing orb. One was of a blond woman in a red dress on a chess board standing next to a column topped by a blue ball as big as her head with lightning coming out of it. Another was of a woman standing in front of a medieval city full of towers with a giant blue moon behind it. (We still have those paintings hung in our hallway.) He must have done 7 of these huge things-- some of the canvases were as large as 4 feet by 6 feet! He tried to paint other things-- but then in a fit he'd wash out the entire thing in white (I remember one really good one of pirates on a ship on a stormy sea...) and start up with a totally new painting that had a blue orb featured in it somewhere.

I just sort of shrugged it off. We were newlyweds at the time, but had lived together for 5 years before being married and were used to one another's little obsessional fits (often in conjunction with with a "weirdness wave") -- so toleration was the rule.

At some point right in the middle of the obsessed blue orb painting we saw our first blue orb of the year. I mean a real one. Gerick was outside smoking one very nice summer night, and suddenly called to me in a stage whisper through the screen door. I heard the urgency in his voice and ran up. He gestured towards the bit of oak woods in our neighbor's huge back yard adjacent to ours. I looked and saw nothing. "What?" I said louder, wondering what he was all intense about.

He quietly pointed at a spot slightly up and to the right and then I saw it. A softly glowing blue orb. I hadn't seen it at first because a big oak's trunk got in the way. It gently floated down the yard, heading towards my left-- staying at about the same level, bobbing just ever so slightly. We watched in silence and wonder, until it seemed to just abruptly wink out right as it became parallel with our own back yard. Did it just stop behind a  trunk or something, playing its own version of "hide n' seek?" But after waiting several minutes without results we relented and went back inside.

Several strange things seemed to happen during this time that indicated the membrane between realities was thinned (as I've often noted when "They" are coming around a lot.) We saw (and felt!) strange fairy-like beings in our bedroom and upstairs hallway. I know how that sounds, but I swear it's true. The only other time I saw something like that was during a wave in 1986-- I saw one for a few seconds just a foot outside my bedroom window in daylight. We had poltergeist events. Rattling doors constantly. Turning water faucets on. Rapping on walls. Oh, and the ghost of my cat who had just died, Sarah, came (apparently through my closet) every night to pad, purr, and lay down at the foot of the bed for several months.

[See--? This full disclosure is hard because it's sounds like absolute bullshit. I know it. But this is what happened. I don't expect most people to believe it, and if you don't just spare me the digs. I'm not writing this to convince anyone of anything. Just sharing it with someone who has similar events in his life and allowing the rest of you to 'peep in.']

The events seemed to climax in the late fall. That's when Gerick finished one of his last huge blue orb paintings. It looked like a portal flanked by a gate topped with a... blue orb. Gerick called it his "doorway" painting. We were running out of room to put all these big paintings, and he stowed this one under the stairs facing out towards the living room. That particular painting was the only one that wigged me out a little bit. I couldn't pinpoint why. Maybe because it lacked a human subject? Maybe because it was 2 feet wide and 6 feet tall and looked 3D enough to step into?-- from a very amateur painter whose other work couldn't compare?

One day soon after finishing it he and I were sitting outside talking. He was on the stoop facing me, and I was on the short cement stairs up to the parking lot facing him, and the front door. Through it, I could see the hallway leading to the living room and the stairs. It was just past sunset, but still light out, and I was totally startled when I saw the gray, fuzzy, obscure 4 foot tall girl (?) step into view from the spot by where the Doorway Painting was leaning against the wall. I gasped and Gerick turned quickly to see what I was looking at- so he saw it (her?) too. The figure was 3-dimensional, but very light gray all over. It looked like a girl with full hair to her shoulders wearing a dress. Or rather, it looked like a ghost of a girl, lacking full color and detail. She was looking right at us! I couldn't see any eyes-- it was all just one fuzzed out gray face. As soon as Gerick started to rise from his position (to see more, since the screen door blocked his view of her legs) she quickly turns and seemed to walk towards the wall and just disappeared. We ran inside to look around, of course, but there was no one in the house. And she definitely disappeared walking towards where the painting was-- we took turns trying to duplicate what we saw and couldn't figure out how she did it.

Within a week or two, we heard our dog going NUTS, barking frantically like he ONLY did when we had an intruder in the house (or stranger he assumed was an intruder.) We jumped out of bed and headed downstairs. We always left a couple of dim lights on both upstairs and down-- especially since I was a big chicken about the dark when all this crazy stuff was going on. I happened to be first down the stairs-- I wake up faster than Gerick does-- and when I got to the bottom of the steps, I saw the most amazing thing: our dachshund chasing a softball sized blue orb around the living room! He was ferocious and crazed chasing that thing like he wanted to kill it. As the blue glowing ball came towards me, I got a good look at it. I heard Gerick coming down the stairs, but was too riveted to look for him.

No matter how many times you see something remarkable like this, there always seems to be that part of your mind saying, "NO FUCKING WAY!" You'd think a person might just accept after a while-- and I'm almost there at this point, almost blase about UFO sightings now-- but, no. You don't believe it even as you see it. So much for "seeing is believing." I'm telling you that's not true.

But the dog could see it, so it wasn't my eyes. The blue ball was very fuzzy, more furry looking than like a clean bubble with a distinct outline, and though it seemed made of light it failed to cause any illumination. That is, there was no reflecting blue light on the walls, ceiling, or surfaces of furniture as it flew close by. It came right towards me in the short hall from the living room to the entryway, and made an abrupt turn to my left. By that time, I was standing only 2 or 3 feet from the painting, having run a little down the hall to rescue the dog instinctively or something I suppose. I saw that thing go INTO the painting, while the dog ran behind and barked at the painting where it had disappeared. But then it came out of the painting again, just a few inches, almost like it was teasing the dog! The second time it went into the painting it didn't come out again. The painting looked no different than before. The dog gave a few more manly barks, then stopped to look at me and wag his tail as if to say, "We did it, Mom! We scared it away! Aren't we a cool team?"

Um... yeah. Talk about a mind fuck combined with an adrenaline rush! Damn!

Gerick barely got there in time to see the slightest glimpse of the blue orb as it made its turn. He didn't get far enough around the stairs to actually see it go into the painting.

And-- maybe it was crazy but I couldn't stand having that painting in the house any more. I felt its presence looming all the time after that-- like some bizarre movie or book about a cursed object. I couldn't relax. With all that had been happening, that last little bit was what sent me over the edge. (Which was a vast improvement since the 1994 wave-- it seemed I was steadily building a tolerance to fear of such things. Fairies. Ghosts. Poltergeists. Orbs at a distance. All these I handled quite well, oddly enough.) The Doorway Painting and several other paintings of blue orbs were either sold or given away to friends very quickly.

Gerick never did another Blue Orb painting. Nor another giant painting. He lost his passion for it utterly after that. He did a few more paintings over the years-- maybe one a year. They were modest things 8" x 11" or 14" x 18".

And the wave of weird stopped abruptly to my recollection as well. There may have been a couple of minor incidents, but things de-escalated rapidly once the Doorway Painting was gone.

It's funny. I totally forgot some of this stuff until I saw Mike's recent blog entries. Then, BOOM! -- a bunch of details filled in and memory was clear once more. Like I've always remembered seeing the larger blue orbs (not just in 1996) but not the smaller one that went into the painting. Nor did I recall Gerick's obsessive "giant paintings with blue orbs" phase that happened along with all of this. Like how could I forget? I pass 2 of those paintings (he did keep a couple of them) every day for years! I think much of that comes because you don't know what to do with some of those memories, so you shove them to the back. I really stopped doing that for the most part after the mid-90s, but my childhood, teens, and early adulthood I had a lot of fear and doubt and conflict over these incidents and so-- some things get released into the ether, taken out of natural mental context of memories.

So, Mike- there's a related event for you!