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This essay originally appeared at medicinegarden.com

           With countless books documenting the history, evidence, conflicting theories and myriad tales of the abduction phenomenon, this article adds but another narrative of this bizarre and ultimately unexplained event. This is my experience and although at 36 years I have had a lifetime of them, this particular account is significant in two ways: This is the first and only encounter with non-human entities in which another adult corroborated the event. And though I would not know it then, it was to be my last abduction experience.

One month after the events chronicled below, I met a woman--a clairvoyant--who was to become my mentor and friend. During that initial meeting, during a reading, she connected with the alien entities and related that the choice to participate in the alien agenda was mine alone. I had chosen to do so, and could choose otherwise. In that instant, I did, and for three years have been on perhaps a permanent vacation from the sometimes overwhelming onslaught of nighttime encounters that had ranged from twice to six times a year, beginning in childhood.

In 1994 I attended a small group workshop lead by John Mack, Harvard professor and author of Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. There were 13 of us, all experiencers, Mack's term to replace the victim label of abductees. During that weekend, I realized just how polarized experiencers were, falling into two extreme camps: tormented victim and blissful participant. I was neither. The aliens (or whatever these beings are) were not my angels and saviors, nor my demons and persecutors. I was a minority in another respect as well. I was one of the few who had recalled my encounters without the aid of hypnosis. By the end of the weekend, the victims had rallied together to lick wounds and discuss the evil greys, while the mystics chatted about other dimensions and tall blond angelic aliens.

To this day, I wonder if there are two camps of aliens or two types of experiencers. In many ways, I could relate to the victim-mind abductees who seemed characterized by an aura of intense fear and shame. When I first began to consciously recall my childhood and ongoing experiences, it was in 1987 at age 25, after reading Communion by Whitley Strieber. To say I was having post traumatic stress was an understatement as memories flooded back and interfered with my daily functioning, then as an editor of a NYC trade magazine. For the first time in my life, I began to have panic attacks.

Yet by 1992 I had moved past the worst of the fear and into a new stage of experiencing these nighttime encounters as a grand, if sometimes scary, adventure. Meditation, dream work and self-hypnotic suggestions to quell the fear seemed to pave the way to clearer and more vivid recall, and the perception of the experiences as neutral. Fear, I reasoned, created a muddy filter through which an encounter became an abduction and an experiencer, a victim. Most of us would be frightened at encountering a bear in the woods, but that biological fight-or-flight mechanism could not be used as evidence that the bear was malevolent. And over time, experience with bears would lead to a reduced level of fear, and a clearer picture of what the bear was really about. I began to see myself as a field researcher in the realm of non- ordinary reality. Whether about ET type aliens or inter-dimensional beings, I was on a mission to bring back information.

Although the excerpt you are about to read from my 1996 diary sounds in places as dramatic as a horror movie, this experience was the exception to the majority encounters which had been far from threatening, and in fact, had been downright theophanous. I've encountered tall white-haired beings that radiate love and short black-eyed creatures that are unreadable; I've been shown places that are wondrous, and instructed in the nature of reality; I've seen the world from space and space from a vantage unlike any on earth. To give this up was not easy.

February 28, 1996

I am excited about this last encounter on my trip to California. For the first time since recalling my experiences, I have had corroboration by another adult that something really has been happening. Before now I've relied on physical marks such as bruises and scars to correlate my encounters to reality, but always in the back of my mind remained the possibility of a stigmata type explanation. (Admittedly, I became more convinced the events were actual when at about three years old, my son began having dreams about creatures or robots in the house the same nights that I would be experiencing an abduction encounter.)

The night before I arrived with my son (then six) in L.A. Audrey experienced a white light in her bedroom, and was unable to move. It was a typical abduction/encounter onset. That night, her husband had also been out of town.

As Audrey relates: "I woke up because I was being blinded by a white light. I was not frightened and just thought they came a day early. I felt the electrical feeling through out my body. Nothing else happened and I don't think I was frightened, I really just felt they had come too early for Lori."

We barely talked about her event though, other than her mention of it on the drive from the John Wayne airport to her Irvine home. Consequently, I was not thinking about aliens or abductions, when four nights later, I woke up at about 2:30 am. I got up and went to check on my son, who was sleeping in a guestroom across the hall. (I was sleeping in Audrey's son's room, while her four-year-old son slept with her and her husband.) I woke up my son for a quick visit to the hall bathroom, and went back to my bed, feeling unusually alert. There was a tension and stillness in the air, an unnatural quiet that in the past I associated with an abduction onset. I also experienced a slight strobing in my peripheral vision. Spooked, I turned on the lamp beside my bed and finally, probably about 2:45 am, fell back asleep.

What woke me next was unprecedented--the bed shook. I bolted up and got ready to run for the doorway. I assumed it was the start of an earthquake. But as I looked around the room, nothing was moving or rattling. The room was still. Yet the sensation of the bed shaking was still fresh in my mind. Indicative of how far removed I was from the alien hypothesis, I started to wonder about the need for an exorcist. Didn't Linda's Blair's bed shake, rattle and roll?

I retrieved my Tarot cards from the nightstand, plunked into a half lotus on the center of the bed and tried to deep breath. I knew that unless I calmed down I would never get back to sleep. I still did not connect the bed shaking with a potential alien encounter. In fact, I speculated wildly that Audrey's house was haunted, that I had picked up a negative spirit in the airport, or that I was having some strange neurological disorder that made me misperceive the bed as shaking--along the lines of those dreams where you fall of a cliff, and wake up with a start. Those falls always feel so real. I imagined there must be a bed-shaking dream as equally convincing.

Eventually, I began to feel calm. I decided to turn to my trusty tarot deck with the question: what was the cause of the night's disturbance? I was surprised to draw the Star, the card I use to represent the aliens (or non- human entities) that I encounter in non-ordinary reality. I proceeded to reshuffle the deck and draw the same card--from a deck of 78--five more times in succession. And repeatedly alongside the Star, I drew the Resurrection card (also called Judgement). The archetype on this card depicts an angel trumpeting Judgement Day, as the souls of the dead rise up. This image of rising up is probably the only card in the whole deck that approximates an abduction encounter, in which there exists the predominate sensation of floating up from the bed. I have always wondered if the body I perceived rising up was my physical self or an astral travel event.

The cards I drew impacted me that night. I'd gone from the logical earthquake scenario to the improbable demonic bed-shaker to the friendly neighborhood alien. Problem was, all my previous encounters had begun from a state of sleep. None involved being abruptly terrified and left wide awake by a moving bed. This was new territory, and some part of me wondered if it was of my own design: a few months earlier, fed up with the uncertainly of the phenomenon, I had written in my journal the demand that the Universe supply a "fully waking, conscious encounter" in which I would know I was awake, and in which I would fully recall all that had transpired. Like a subliminal or post-hypnotic suggestion, my request seemed to be kicking in.

There was yet another factor to consider. About a week earlier, I had purchased a scepter quartz crystal from a New Age store. This crystal I had buried in the woods near my home for several days before leaving for California, with the intention to "purify it" as directed by the store owner. Never having worked with crystals before, I complied. I had purchased the crystal simply because it seemed to literally hum with tangible energy every time I held it. When I had gone to retrieve the crystal in the woods on the way to the airport, a recent snowfall had almost obscured its burial plot-but eventually I recovered it, at the base of a big old oak with deer tracks gracing the snow around it. That crystal now sat on the bedside table. I wondered if in some way it was responsible for amplifying the events of that night.

Despite all these thoughts, I began to feel tired and reluctantly lay down. No sooner had my head hit the pillow, than I started to drift into sleep. Once again, I felt the bed shake. I sat up, stared at the fire engine red headboard, expecting to see it rattling and stubbornly still thinking earthquake. Though I thought I saw the headboard quiver slightly, the bed itself and the room were stock-still.

At this point, I wanted to run into Audrey's room and wake her up. Terror loves company. But her husband might never invite me back again, so instead, still wired from the adrenaline rush, I sat up and began meditating for about fifteen minutes, with emergency mantras like: I replace fear with love, or I am surrounded by the protection of white light.

At about 3:15 I lay back down with the light still on, and found myself irresistibly tired. Against common sense I let my eyes close-they were so heavy and I was suddenly so tired. I heard noise in the hall, what sounded like Adrian cry out and Audrey's voice, but I could not open my eyes. They seemed glued shut. On the verge of sleep I became aware of a presence rolling me gently from the bed and floating me downward through what seemed the floor of the room, though I wondered if I had in fact gone through a window, then down to the street. My reaction was, "oh shit, why did I go back to sleep, I should have stayed awake." I was too afraid to open my eyes, with the silly reasoning that what I couldn't see, couldn't hurt me. But I must have opened them because I was aware at one point of being beneath a freeway overpass, in the dark, the ground rain-slicked and wet around me. I had the sense we were somehow in a hurry, that my waking up twice had jeopardized some schedule.

Next thing I know, I am in a room, lying on my back. I feel my right leg being lifted into a stirrup-type position, though I do not feel any actual stirrup. I am aware that I do not seem to be wearing underwear, though I had gone to bed wearing some along with an oversized T-shirt. It seems a while before I also feel my left leg being pushed up, so that I am now in a standard gynecological exam position. I manage to open my eyes at that point.

My head is turned to the left and I am surprised to see Audrey lying naked on a table nearby. Her knees are also raised up and I see two beings by her head, with one below performing what seems a pelvic exam. Audrey seems to be unconscious as the examiner withdraws an instrument from between her legs--an instrument extracting what looks like a fluid-filled sac with what I assume to be a fetus inside.

At this point, as in a lucid dream, I begin to think that this is simply too much a scenario from a Bud Hopkins book. I have never been a proponent of the abduction scenario as a harvest of human embryos, which has always seemed far too anthropomorphic an interpretation of alien motivations. I even think: I am only seeing this because it is what I expect to see, because it is what I have read about before. I want to believe that in fact what I am seeing is my brain's feeble attempt to decode an event so non-ordinary that fertility is the closest human symbol for understanding this strange transaction. But even as I think all this, I am still seeing an apparent pelvic exam and gestational sac extraction on my nearby friend.

My attention turns back to my own predicament, in which I perceive a pelvic exam underway, yet I cannot turn my head, nor sense any discomfort. I am aware of the room being cold, and of feeling cool air against my body.

My next memory is of being helped into a standing position and leaning over what seems to be a blue-light hole in the floor. The being to my right and slightly behind me puts its hand and arm against my mid-back and gently pushes me into the hole. I feel myself float slowly down in a parachutist's position. Next, I feel my cheek land on the pillow of the bed, facing the wall--the opposite direction from which I had fallen asleep. I wanted to jump up and run to Audrey's room to yell an abduction alert, and to see if she was OK. Yet I could not wake up immediately and instead slipped into a dream.

In the dream I saw a gaping incision on the back of my left leg, just below my buttock. In the dream, I was going to show this to Audrey as proof of what had happened. Part of me knew I was still lying on my stomach, unable to wake up, though I desperately wanted to do so.

When I did manage to eventually wake up, I was facing the same direction in which I had fallen asleep. I reached for the clock. It was exactly 4:18 am, only about one hour since I had fallen back asleep and the apparent abduction had begun. I reviewed the events of the night, determined not to forget them. Then, unbelievably, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning I checked my leg for a wound, but saw nothing. Nor did Audrey recall anything and so I wondered if I had imagined her participation. She did however, recall waking up in the night and checking the time-she woke up at 4:13 she said. This was too close to the time I also woke from the experience to be coincidental.

The next day, while taking a shower, I noticed a red mark on the back of my thigh, which had been itchy all day beneath my jeans. Situated in the same place as the wound in my dream, the inch-wide circular patch was speckled and looked like small blood blisters beneath the skin. I showed it to Audrey, just to verify that the strange mark was indeed there.

I was troubled though by my memory of Audrey being with me that night on the "ship" or in the non-ordinary reality event. Although she claimed no memory of the event, seeing her there had been so startlingly real. Purposely I did not tell her everything I saw happening to her, so that if her own memory returned, it would not be contaminated by my version of events.

Ironically, later in the week Audrey suddenly confessed she had an unexplained bruise on her right buttock. She showed it to me: it was round and defined, and had turned the yellow-brown of a days-old bruise. It also looked exactly like a fingerprint.

CALIFORNIA PART TWO

That first encounter happened on Tuesday night. By Saturday I'd managed to put it behind me enough to at least sleep at night. The only reminder was Tarot card reader at the Santa Monica Psychic Eye Bookshop, aptly named Star, who insisted I was steeped in fear about something operating in my life. I didn't bother to tell her it was a bad case of post-abduction trauma.

Our days were filled with busy and tiring trips to the beach, Disneyland, and other sights with the kids. Saturday we spent the day around the house reading and relaxing, with a late afternoon trip to Corona del Mar. That evening, I went to bed early and read until 11 pm. At 1:20 am, I woke up startled because the bed had shaken again, this time more forcibly than before. And this time, it was as if the whole bed had moved, whereas the previous events had seemed to originate from the headboard as if someone had lifted the bed at one end and then dropped it.

Ridiculously, I thought again that it had to be an earthquake. When I turned on the light, I realized the room was still, and that something was standing at the foot of the bed. Between the bed's vertical red rails, two huge black eyes hovered mid-air, about three feet from the floor. I saw no body. The image of the eyes quickly faded, as if I had spotted an after-image from the flash of a camera.

Now I was far to unnerved to sleep. I had seen something at the end of the bed. I went to my son's room across the hall and carried him into my bed. If I was going to suffer, I wanted company. I fell asleep soon after, exhausted, and with the light on. I tossed and turned, and became angry, yelling in my sleep at some creature, seeing a door swing open, and basically having a bad sleep. At one point, I felt the bed shake again, and woke up in time to see my son bolt upright in bed, apparently feeling it too. Strangely, I pushed him back on to his pillow and told him to go back to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up at about 9 am and went straight to Audrey's room to tell her about my night. She was already up, sitting at her computer in her pajamas with a cup of coffee in hand. Before I could say anything, she began by relating that she had to tell me all about last night. We went downstairs so that the kids would not overhear our conversation.

Sitting on the family room sofa, she told me that her son had awakened her sometime after 1 am to locate his soother. After moving him to the middle of the bed, Audrey lay down on the edge of the bed nearest the hall door. What happened next correlates eerily to my experiences in the other room.

Recalls Audrey: "I then opened my eyes shortly after. I am not sure why, but I feel it was around 2:30 am. I saw a form go by the bed quickly and it moved as if it was floating. Straight across not like a person walks. I tried to look at the clock but I couldn't move. I checked to see if I was really awake or dreaming. I kept blinking my eyes and looking around and I realized I was awake. Every once in a while I would do this because I could not believe I was really awake and not dreaming this.

I tried to get up but my legs felt paralyzed and with pressure on them. I wanted to make sure Lori was OK, but I could not get up. I was frightened because I knew they were not there for me. I kept thinking, poor Lori, I hope she is OK. Then, unbelievably, I fell asleep."

Despite Audrey's concern, I had no memory of anything happening to me that night other than the shaking bed and phantom eyes. The rest of the night had seemed a jumble of bad dreams rather than an actual abduction, though I was willing to consider there occurred more that I did not recall.

Since that time almost three years ago, I have not experienced even one nocturnal encounter with non-human entities, though I often sense that a change of mind is all that it might take to re-introduce these experiences. My regular dream life has remained as vivid, archetypal, psychological and prophetic as ever, indicating to me that these events had little to do with dreams at all. In fact, it has been proposed that the abduction experience is in some sense, an initiation. Beliefs are transformed, egos are fractured and the sense of self dramatically expanded and altered.

Writes John Mack in his book Abduction, "The abduction experiences themselves shatter the illusion of our control and demonstrate forcefully that we are helpless in the face of forces and beings whose purpose we do not understand. Each abductee discovers that he or she is but one intelligent being in a universe populated with various other entities that are not supposed to exist. Human beings are not lords of the earth, they realize, but children of the cosmos who must find their way to live in harmony with all manner of creatures on earth and elsewhere. This is a terrifying lesson in humility that opens the psyche to a wider perception of the universe, including the beings and entities that inhabit it."

I can only add that, for me, these experiences and the memory of them were catalytic and life-changing. There were times when the fear and disorientation were so great I felt my sanity to be a fine thread in danger of snapping. And there were the times when encounters would leave me holding on to insights and emotions I felt my being far too small a vessel to contain. The vastness, strangeness, otherness of these encounters are inseparably woven into the fabric of who I am. The truth is, I would feel incomplete without them.

Some have asked me why I chose to forfeit these adventures if they were indeed benign, and I have no simple answer. At best, I felt I was learning about another reality but at the same time these encounters were disruptive and distracting, making it difficult to stay grounded in the mundane. The mystery of it was so great that like a detective, I was inexorably compelled to unravel clues and sift evidence, all the while distancing myself from living fully in the present, connected to purpose. Some day, I may go back. For now, that door--like the door to C.S. Lewis' magical world of Narnia--is closed.

Lori Lothian is a professional clairvoyant with clients across the US and Canada.

Recommended books: Abduction by John Mack; Angels and Aliens by Keith Thompson; Dark White by Jim Schnabel; Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by CDB Bryan; Alien Dawn by Colin Wilson; Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs; Dimensions by Jaques Vallee.