Shadows In Motion

a deep thoughts & spiritual musings Blog

After at least a decade there is an update to the “Shadow Daemon” experience.  Casual conversation starts a bizarre trip down memory lane..

Last night did not begin out of the ordinary.  With nothing to do, and no where to go do it, an old pal of mine came by to pick me up and we planned to spend the evening chatting & playing games at his place.

Sometime around 1 A.M. we found ourselves in the living room talking about this-and-that.  Coast To Coast was on the radio, and our conversation turned to ’stranger’ topics.

The first of which that came up was my Short Lil Shadow People experience.  I had assumed that he had already read it and so I only briefly mentioned it, but he stopped me and told me that he hadn’t and that he wanted to hear about it.  Although this isn’t the focus of this post, I do like to provide alternative points of views of my experiences.  I do not agree with him but his impression of the “Short Lil Shadow People” experience reminded him quite a bit of “Communion : A True Story” by Whitley Strieber, the now-famous alien abduction story.

Anyway, one ’shadow person’ story easily lead to another and I made mention of my “Shadow Daemon” experience.  This is where things began to turn really weird, and to be honest, I still find this very hard to believe…

It’s true that he and I have brought the subject up from time to time within the past decade or so.  Neither of us really went into much detail with the experience.  We both took for granted what we knew and how we remembered it.

“We” remembered it?  If you’ve read the experience, then you know that I describe in as much detail as I can:  How I was sitting on the porch swing, who was on the porch with me, and what they were doing. 

You see, the way that I remember it is that a “then-family-friend” was on the porch with my parents.  He was laughing, my father’s back was faced toward me, and my mother was sitting on a flat slab of stone with her left arm facing me.  These aren’t details that I mention in my original retelling of the experience, but this is how clearly I remember the setting.

Apparently, if I am to believe what I was told last night, none of this is true.  My memories aren’t merely wrong, but for that moment that I saw the “Shadow Daemon” they appear to be completely altered.

You see, it turns out that he was there.  Nevermind the fact that, as I remember it, he was not.

He begins to tell me how he remembers it and piece after piece of my memory is said to be wrong.  My parents were not on the porch that night, no one was standing to my left, and, I wasn’t sitting on the porch swing at the time of the experience.  In fact, he says, I hadn’t even began to eat the apple prior to the experience.

Read the original experience as I recall it, and then read it according to how he told me it happened:

I was standing at the top of the steps, with the porch roof’s support pillar to my right.  The “then-family-friend” was there, and one of them were standing to my left and the other was somewhat behind me.  We were all standing pretty close together and casually talking about this-and-that when I looked at the tree and suddenly froze.

This friend of mine that I was talking to last night - we’ll call him Stragee since that’s his preferred Internet nickname - told me that I had a look of terror on my face and that I was “just staring at the tree”.  At first, he says, he and the other laughed about it because they could see nothing.  Stragee even considered waving a hand in front of my face “to see if I was there”.  They didn’t take it seriously and thought that I was pulling a prank.

After a few moments, however, Stragee says that he began to get a little weirded out.  I wasn’t moving, I wasn’t blinking, and the look on my face hadn’t changed.  “I think a little tear even ran down your cheek”, he told me.

There’s more.  When I broke out of it I completely freaked out.  “Did you see it!?  It was right fucking there.  It was going to kill me!”, he quotes me as saying.

They of course asked, “Seen what?” and said that there was nothing there.  I continued to freak out and I responded something like, “Bullshit, it was right there,” pointing to how close it had gotten to me.  They again said that they had seen nothing, and I went on to tell them how tall it was.  I was standing on the porch, but this shadow thing was not, and I told them that it was at least eye level with me if not a bit taller.  I told them that, “It was just like a shadow”.

The apple also wasn’t as large as I remembered it being, but I do correctly remember that I had squeezed it so hard that my fingers had dug into it.  Stragee told me that I had apple juice down my arm from where I had squeezed it so hard.

I continued to freak out over the experience and one of them - Stragee says that he can’t recall exactly who but it may have been him - went over to the tree to examine the bushes.  As you may recall from my original retelling, this “Shadow Daemon” had physically moved the bushes out of its way.

I also learned something else last night.  Do you recall me mentioning that, through all these years, I couldn’t remember what its face looked like?

Now, you have to understand.  Although I have had a number of strange experiences even I consider some things to be cliche.  Some things I simply shrug off, and one of those things that I view this way are stories of “things with red eyes”.  I mean, come on - that’s so over used!  “It had red eyes” makes me want to roll my eyes.

Since I haven’t been able to remember this thing’s face for at least a decade I took this opportunity to ask him if I had described to him what it had looked like.  Specifically asking about the face.  Imagine the look on my face when he quoated me as saying, “It had red eyes and it was looking right at me”.

Huh…

My memory of the event is very vivid, considering how long ago this happened, and so I find it very difficult to accept this “other version”.  Stragee, however, raised some very good points.

Such as, “If you had been sitting on the far side of the porch swing then you wouldn’t have had a clear view of the tree,” and he’s absolutely right about that.  If I had been sitting where I distinctly recall myself sitting then it would not have been physically possible to see the tree!  This incredibly simple revelation was startling to me - why had I never thought of it?  It’s so obvious, yet, my memory of where I was is so clear that I never questioned it.

There are a few other good points that he brought up, but two of which smacked me as being particularly good points.

First of all, while talking about it he suggested that it was such a traumatic event to me that my mind had actually altered my memory of the situation as best as it could without completely removing the memory.  I agree with him - that was, without a doubt, so far the most terrifying experience that I’ve had.  In that moment I had absolutely no doubt that I was dead.  The only thing left to do - and this is why I broke out of the paralyzation - was to hurt the thing as best as I could “before it ate me”.  Of course, that’s when I decided to throw the apple straight into its face, and that’s when the “Shadow Daemon” literally vanished.

So, accepting his theory that my mind had “warm & fuzziefied” the memory as best as it could, the two points he made that I thought were particularly good were:

1.) My mind placed me as far away from the event that it could.  I didn’t want to be anywhere near the thing, so my mind altered the memory and placed me as far away from the thing as it could without completely removing me from the situation - at the far end of the porch swing.

2.) That the size of the apple was another thing that my mind altered.  It was ‘the only weapon’ that I had against the thing, and as some strange form of reassurance, the memory was altered to increase the size of the apple and thus increasing the size of “the weapon”.

Stragee informed me that I had indeed sat down at the porch swing, but it was only after the event and, what’s more, that I was on the opposite side of the swing from which I remember sitting.  That is, the side closest to the steps.  He also made loose mention that I had leaned over a few times to see if anything was hiding behind the roof’s support pillar.

There was a lot of repeating of the conversation.  I went back over some of the points a few times as did he.  After the conversation I got pretty tired and decided that it was time to get to sleep.  By now, it was approximately 4:00 AM.

Personally, I want to disbelieve what he told me.  My memory of this event is so clear to me that I can’t help but think that Stragee is pulling my leg or getting a couple of memories confused.

Yet, since I was paralyzed on fixated on the things eyes then how would I have seen what the others were doing?  How did I see the tree thru the support beam?

I wouldn’t have been able to, and I’m attempting to wrap my mind around the fact that, my mind, had altered the memory of the experience…

…and I want to know the rest of what happened.  Stragee brought up progressive hypnosis and I would love to try this.  Unfortunately I don’t have the money to pay for this service and, even if I did, I don’t know who around my location would even provide this service.

If I do find someone who’ll do this then I also want to check one or two other things.  Just because I’m a naturally very curious person.

Of course, I’ll be sure post any reports to myskyra.net if I ever get this done.

~Mysk