Chapter 5:
Shadow Man
During the holidays my family almost always was the one to travel across states and join my grandparents at their home in Oklahoma. However, there was one year that my grandma from Durant came down to our (much smaller) house along with my uncle from Tulsa. This meant I had to give up my room for our extra guests and I had to sleep on a cot set up in my dad's office (back when “computer rooms” were a thing and the “Internet” was a location in the house to visit) in between all of his boxes of old junk (pure gold, in my opinion) and various CDs.
Everyone acted like I got the short end of the arrangement but I was thrilled. I always loved sleeping on new things in new places. Probably because of the nightmares I grew up with. The same bed, my own bed, always grew uncomfortable. I liked refreshment. I still do.
Anyway, this moment is one of the earlier moments of my life where I had my concept of reality challenged and my belief system shattered. At the same time, when I was younger, things that are shocking to most of today's world seemed like they made perfect sense from how I saw it back then. When we're younger we're experiencing life for the first time so anything that happens could just be a thing that happens here in life on Earth. What do we know? Then we get taught how to think, feel and perceive every aspect of our experience and kinda slow down the flow of expansion.
The first night of sleeping on the cot I woke up at around 5 am, while the house was still dark and everyone was still asleep. I looked out of the computer room into the hallway from my comfy cot. I noticed a figure, quite tall, quite skinny, standing against the wall before the living room, about 50 feet from me.
Initially, I was spooked. Chills went down my body. Fear arose in my stomach. But, confusion settled me down and I began to be more curious than threatened. The towering, lanky figure was over 7 feet tall, seemingly flat, like paper (2 dimensional), and nothing but a shadow. His features were difficult to discern from the rest of his body but they were very much there. After a few seconds, the shadow man turned only his head to face me, then bent at the waist, still leaning on the wall, smiled very big and waved, looking directly at me, with long, skinny, spindly fingers.
If this was an attempt to scare me further, it backfired. As I had grown up with nightmares, fear of the dark, and many, many horrific real life experiences. A shadow man smiling at me in the hallway was rather nice, for a change.
I stared back at him, though I didn't engage in the waving or smiling. I didn't move. I pretty much just ignored him, rolled over and fell back asleep. When I woke up it was bright and Shadow Man was gone like he had never even existed, which is, of course, what some tried to convince me of.
I told anyone who would listen that morning about Shadow Man and our interaction. My grandma figured I was just groggy and seeing things. My step mom told me that there's theories of time travelers from other realms that have been perceived as shadows passing through in our experience. This was very interesting to me, but didn't make sense for what I had seen. Years later, after watching the horror movie “Dark Skies”, which drew a lot from reality and true experiences, I finally connected that I probably interacted with a Gray. However, I wasn't negatively affected, he gained no fear or energy from me, and life went on.
Learning about the Grays made me think further about my step mom's comments immediately after this happened as a boy. Time travelers, other realms, shadows. All of those descriptions could, in a roundabout way, fit the Grays. My step mom has always been very knowledgeable about extraterrestrial activity.
My father, after years of supernatural and direct experiences, met my step mother and my biological mother at Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) meetings. It was a national group whose Austin chapter was led by a couple named Monty & Ellen. MUFON got exposed in later years for providing their hypnotherapy tapes to the US Government, effectively serving as an operation to gain intelligence from unsuspecting, perhaps desperate innocents, rather than the safe haven for experiencers and the curious that it claimed to be. One of the lead investigators was a woman named Josi Galante whose home I grew up visiting, filled with Ancient Egyptian art and several cats. She never spoke to me or acknowledged my presence. Her and my step mom were friends and she made some very accurate predictions about me prior to my birth. I say this mainly to express that I grew up very comfortable with alternate reality concepts, for out of the ordinary people, places and things were exactly what I was born into and bred from. It doesn't surprise me that some trippy things have occurred in my life and continue in present day.
Of course, I kept this story to myself for most of my adult years. Last year I told a friend and he confessed to me that he had a similar experience as a child that he never talks about. I imagine we aren't the only ones to have mind-bending moments as children that we grew up and changed or altered the reality of to fit in better with others, to not be frustrated by the inability to explain the unexplainable, and to cater to the social standards and landscape of adulthood. If someone tells you “that never happened” enough times, you eventually believe it. Huh. Must have imagined it.
I encourage you to value the experiences you don't understand and to be okay with them. Voice them. Express them. Things happened. They're real. We may have more in common than we realize, in regards to challenging and confusing experiences that we've lived through. Please share your stories, they matter for all who come after you.
This is just one story, the fifth story, in a series of stories that makes up what you read today. Rooted will never cease to intrigue and will always aim to inspire. I am deeply grateful for the experiences that I have had, the people who have pushed me to share them, and those who discover and receive my expressions today and tomorrow.
This chapter marks the end of Rooted. To bigger and brighter days ahead - that we can only bring towards us by experiencing them right here, right now. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here on Earth with me.