23

I wake to the sight of five shadowy black pulses wafting through the doorway into my bedroom and approaching my bed.

And that’s it. I sit up, fully roused.

The shadowy pulses are gone.

They didn’t just disappear. They might’ve never been.

I’m alone in my bedroom.

Nothing but me and what happened.

I think of this in-between world between waking and sleep, this realm where the conscious mind is shutting down, and dreaming and reality blurs.

There’s an alarm here, but I’m not overly worried. I haven’t kicked into fight or flight mode. My anxiety is not cycling up to catastrophising what’s going on.

Of course, I’m older now. There are ways I can ramp down any escalating fears.

And, weirdly, I’m good in high-pressure situations. The real world, not so much. But the moment anything untoward happens, the moment you need calm, my mind snaps into focus.

Like one time, when I was taking a walk many years ago, I heard a commotion as I approached one street. As I rounded the corner, I saw that the garage of a house was on fire. A horde of people had formed a perimeter to watch. Four others shuttled buckets of water from neighbouring houses and tried to put the fire out.

I called Emergency, reported the situation (although the Emergency operator told me it had already been reported), then joined in the rescue mission, grabbing a bucket, filling it at the neighbour’s across the street, then running back to the garage to douse the fire.

Back and forth and back I went with these other four people, until my face was tinged as if with sunburn, and smoke had ingrained my jacket.

Meanwhile, the crowd continued to watch, chatting gaily as if they were attending some local sporting event. They were content to be spectators. They were happy just to stand there – so many able-bodied people doing nothing but enjoying the novelty of it all.

The rest of us kept at it until firefighters finally arrived to take control of the situation. Dumping my bucket, I walked on. My heart didn’t beat any faster. Adrenaline wasn’t running the way it would for a panic attack. I completed my walk, arrived home, and went on with my day.

Nothing but calm.

Like now: I’m focused. I’m not in danger.

Whatever I saw wasn’t physically part of my world. It wasn’t a stream of home invaders who’d broken in to murder me and steal my TV.

So either this was some hypnagogic hallucination, some half dream, and it was entirely dismissible, or this was something that I’d seen in the periphery of my consciousness, some otherworldly entities with whom I shared the same space, but not the same plane.

Were they just proceeding on their own way, passersby who were oblivious to me, or saw me as some shadowy but unimportant entity that could be ignored? Or was I their focus and they had some intent, some motive, which I was unaware of?

And if that was the case, if this was some other existence which I glimpsed, what did they want with me?

I think of all the things we do with other lifeforms. When we’re kids, we throw insects to teams of ants to see them battle it out. As adults, we hunt animals. We pen them in grotesque conditions to breed them, or farm them as food. Others are experimented upon, sometimes for superficial reasons, and other times for humanitarian applications.

What if that’s all we are? Some lower lifeform used as test cases for something far greater than us?

Or, worse, nothing more than entertainment?

I try to find sleep, but wonder if these things are still around me, still watching, but simply no longer visible to me.

And, if they are, what their interest is.