UFO Themed Dreams and Memory

Rosemary Ellen Guiley was the guest on last night's episode of Coast to Coast. The topic: dreams. Host Noory asked Guiley why it is that we don't remember dreams. (We may remember dreams a day or two later, but not over time, certainly not years.) Guiley said that dreams are in the "short term memory" part of the brain. (Realize I'm paraphrasing here and working from memory.) She explained that, unless something very intense and important happened at the time of the dream, trying to remember it, if trauma happened, then the dream would be remembered. 

Salvidor Dali, Persistence of Memory

So, that had me thinking. The dreams that I remember involved UFOs and or entities. The "Patio Alien" that I've written about here in the past happened a good fifty-five years ago. Yet I remember that "dream" to this day. And, in fact, I have only called it a dream because, what else could it have been? 

The second was a dream -- the Geisha Woman-Alien "dream" -- but, the question is, based on what? Why does that dream out of the thousands of dreams stand out? Was the dream a cover memory dream of an actual event? (In that dream, I am inside a domed spaceship out in space. The walls are glass. I sit across from a very tall, chalky white alien with the big eyes, but she is wearing a black "geisha" style wig. She is one cold detached being. I am angry, furious, that she will not let me go, and will not let me see my husband, who is somewhere on this ship.)

Speaking of this second dream/memory, I had this dream in the same time frame and location as our missing time episode. I've written about both many times. I asked Jim, who was present during the missing time episode, if he remembers if I had this Geisha Woman-Alien dream before or after the missing time. Neither one of us remembers. What is for certain though, is that the dream did happen during this phase.

There is also my eagle "dream" from when I was about four. Again, I remember this in vivid detail and emotion, and have to put it in the category of "dream" because, once again, how could it literally be? (A few nights ago I had a weird experience regarding this eagle presence, which I posted about at my Mothman blog.)

And of course, there are the dancing invisible aliens that came to visit me during my childhood. All "dreams" and yet . . . they remain, in vivid detail, stand-out episodes of my life. Why those and not others?

Finally, Jim remembers a "dream" he had when he was a child that haunts him to this day. He calls it his "Popcorn UFO" dream.  An excerpt from an article I wrote for Tim Binnall's site a few years ago:

When he was ten years old, he said he had what he calls the “pop corn machine dream.” He was living in Hawthorne, California, at the time. Back then the area was almost out in the sticks, no sidewalks, brush, tumbleweeds. He woke up -- or, as he put it, he dreamt he woke up -- to see a craft outside his window. He went on board, where he saw a machine that “smelled like popcorn, and it reminded me of one of those popcorn machines.”  

“I knew they were aliens, and they weren’t good. Over my life, of all the dreams I’ve had about aliens, they’ve never been good in any of them. They’ve been all about bad, or Trickster at best.” (To this day he talks about how he hated living out there, moving from the Hollywood area to live in the middle of nowhere. 

This could probably be chalked up to being a kid, and suddenly uprooted from friends and school. But I wonder if some of this intense dislike has something to do with his “alien” experiences.) 

I told him I rarely see aliens in my dreams. (But then I immediately remembered my “Geisha Woman” dream of the tall female gray being; where I found myself on board, sitting across a tall “gray” female with black hair.) He said “I have. They’re usually human looking, but alien nonetheless. I just know they’re aliens. I don't’ think I’ve ever had gray aliens, specifically, but I have had insectoid aliens, giant preying mantis kind of things.” (When he said that, I almost fell out of the chair!) 

He continued: “You never see them completely, but more like parts of them, and they appear in parts, revealing themselves slowly. I never see the whole thing.”
“Do you still have alien dreams?” I asked him.
“Yeah, occasionally.”
“I don’t have bad dreams or scary dreams that often, but when I do, they’re about aliens. Whatever it is I’ve been seeing all my life, it hasn’t been good,” he said again. (Regan Lee, July 2007,  Trickster's Realm at Binnall of America.)