Shared Dreams? Can You Help Some Brothers Out?

I’ve really wanted to put this out there for years but haven’t had the time. Tonight I went to bed too early and woke up really early and now have the time. But bear with me, I need to set up a little background so you can understand the story.

My brother is two years younger than I am, and we are getting close to 50. I am an attorney and he is a medical doctor, both practicing in the same small town community. Our professional backgrounds and our family name would cause anyone in our community to aggressively defend our character for telling the truth or being honest.

Our father was a very successful professional in the same town. In 1969 he built our beautiful home a couple of miles from town. The event I’m addressing occurred in or around 1975, I was 8, my little brother was 6.

This happened in our bedroom so I need to set up the dimensions. Our bedroom was rectangular and I’m guessing its dimensions were about 16' by 12', one long wall being common to the exterior. The other long wall had an entrance to the left of 3 feet, with a door that swung from right to left to the interior. Immediately to the right of the entrance was another 3 foot wall creating a short hallway. This hallway was due to the interior closet which had an interior depth of two feet. From the left to the right, the closet was composed of about 3/4 double shelf garment racks, with contained hanging dowels and 1 foot shelves. The other 1/4 was composed of five or six shelves about 2' by 4'. The closet doors were plain double 3' doors that swung out. When the left door was fully opened it partially blocked the short hallway entrance. The light in the closet was a singe bulb above the garment racks. It had a pull chain string with no wall switch.

We slept on bunk beds which were up against the exterior long wall, I was on the top bunk, my brother on the bottom.

To understanding this story it is very important to grasp a visual on the above description of our bedroom.

It is likewise very important to know what commercials were popular on television at the time. Fruit-of-the-Loom was big at that time which had many animated fruit characters, grapes, apple and leaf. Also, Planters Peanuts had a commercial running which included an animated giant peanut man.

Now here we go. One night shortly after we had been put to bed, the closet light came one in a weird fashion. It started with a very dim illumination and then became very bright. Not a pull chain ignition. Then, the double doors slowly swung open, the left one partially blocking the hallway entrance. When the doors were fully opened, we saw multiple animated characters on all of the shelves in the closet. On the top shelf of the garment racks was a Jack-O-Lantern character which seemed to be the leader. Most of his body was composed of what appeared to be a simple orange pumpkin jack-o-lantern. He had thin long arms and legs. This seems weird, but he was pounding an anvil with a hammer and had a huge smile as if to gain our approval. I cannot explain why I might conjure this image in my mind during a dream at that age.

If I remember correctly of the many other animated characters, some included what would be the Fruit-of-the-Loom characters. But there were so many it is somewhat of a blur.

After all of this evolved, I remember looking down to my brother’s bunk and him looking at me. I immediately jumped down and tried to run out of the room. I know, I was leaving my little brother to fend for himself, but I was scared #less. But when I swung the left door back to get through the hallway the Planters Peanut Man was standing behind the door laughing. They all were laughing. I immediately ran and jumped into my brother’s lower bunk. We both began screaming very loudly for Mom. She appeared and turned the light on. All of the animations disappeared and the closet light was off. She dismissed our story and we went back to bed and some how dozed off to sleep.

The weird thing about this event was our memory. Apparently both of us had no memory of it for years. But when I was about 14, and VCR’s were very new and novel, my mother purchased the movie The Shining. After my brother and I had seen that movie about three times I spontaneously recalled the event and asked him if he did too. He acknowledged the event but like me was kind of squeamish about the reality of it. It was like our memory that night had been blacked out but reformed years later. I cannot explain how that feels, but it is eery.

Later when both of us were in college we told Mom the story over a holiday visit. She knew us and knew we were telling the truth. She was really disappointed because, being a little superstitious, thought building a new house would have prevented paranormal events. Other than that, my brother and I have never really talked about the event since. But, during the discussion with my mother my brother had the same vivid details of the event as I did.

So about 10 years ago a very good friend of mine, and my brother’s, was telling me about some paranormal anomalies occurring in his house and some other event which he personally witnessed involving ghosts. I told him I could not really claim witness to anything paranormal other than the event I described above, which I hadn’t really thought of since being a teenager.

So, what did my brother and I experience that night? It really doesn’t appear to be a ghostly event. And, it would be an atypical alien encounter. Could we have experience identical dreams and somehow shared the memory? I really don’t know but it has driven me crazy for years. I’ve even considered hypnosis to make sure I’m remembering accurately. Any suggestions or insight would be greatly appreciated.

reply to post by Longshots
I had something similar occur when I was around 13 or so. I awoke and looked right to see this little Mexican bandit cartoon character a foot away from my face. He was clear white with green sombrero, red scarf and a gun in each hand. The little critter was going at it like Yosemite Sam...angry, but harmless.

I woke up again and put it down to a dream and the radio next to the bed was white, red and green. As an adult, I now know these incidents are hypnagogic illusions.

In your case, is it possible your brother didn't say he saw exactly what you saw? Did he in fact remember the shouting part of the incident and not the cast of critters in your closet? If so, you probably had a hypnagogic experience that, over years, has taken on the memory of a shared experience with your brother. Perhaps you woke him up screaming in his bed and his natural reaction was to join in with the shouting?

I'm not trying to dismiss your claims only offering an explanation that has made sense of some of my own waking encounters with the weird stuff.

Fortean Times article on hypnagogia

Wiki on hypnagogia

ETA: Hypnopompic is also used in cases of waking dreams/illusions.

Your story jumped out at me. Mainly because I experienced something similar and it was totally random and odd as is your story.
I was between 8 and 10. My brother, five years younger than me, also slept on the bottom bunk. We were put to bed around 8 or 8:30. I never wanted to go to sleep right away and me and my brother would always end up talking and horsing around. (which would sometimes lead to us getting in trouble.)
Anyways, on this nite, pretty late, the talking died down a bit and I was thinking my brother had drifted off to sleep, leaving me up alone in the darkness. I lay there on my stomach, not looking at anything in particular, just looking down towards the floor. As I lay there, I started seeing slight movements here and there. The first that caught my eye was towards our door. As I focused in on the movement, I could start to see a small detailed figure, about a foot tall. It looked like a robot to be honest. Like a tiny transformer but not brightly colored like the new movies portray. The more I stared at this figure, the more creeped out I got. It was just walking in a circle like it was waiting on something. I had to take my eyes off of it because I was getting scared. I looked away and a minute later, looked back. This time the figure was not pacing in circles by the door. It had moved over about four feet from the door and was now standing infront of the deerborne heater in the corner of the room. And it seemed the robot figure was looking up at me on the top bunk. I got really creeped. I looked away, towards the otherside of the room. A long toy chest stood in the middle of the wall in this direction. On that toy chest, their were similar figures, not quiet as tall as the first, but all of them moved about the top of the chest, randomly stopping to look up at me. I was terrified. I looked back to the heater and the first robot was still their. He had his little fist pounding it into his had like he wanted to punch me. I thought I was seeing things until my brother, with a quiet, squeak of a voice, said, 'what is that?' I replied with, 'are you awake, are you seeing these?' At which point he stood up on his mattress and shimmied up the ladder to the top bunk with me. He was just as scared as I was, if not more. When he got up top with me, he pointed to the heater and asked again, 'what is that?' He said 'there are more over there.' pointing to the toy box. He also kept looking to one of the opposite corners where a desk sat. He said 'that ones really scary.' I didn't ever see one there but it really tripped me out that he pointed out the two exact spots and seemed to be seeing the same number of figures. After a few minutes of being petrified together we began calling for mom. As loud as our voices would call. In a few minutes we heard her footsteps coming through the kitchen. She arrived at our door, flipping the lights on, at which time the figures totally disappeared. We tried explaining to her what we saw and even turned the lights back off and on again to see if they reappeared in the darkness. Nothing ever happened after that and we eventually settled down and went to sleep.
We didn't talk about it the next day or for a few years afterwards. It was like I didn't even remember it until a few years later. I brought it up to my brother. He recalled the same details and frightened feeling. At that point I started getting a strange feeling about it. It seemed so confusing that I didn't remember it happening and my brother apparently didn't remember it either because it was never talked about.
It was so weird and even to this day, I get a strange feeling about it. Like we were being tricked or something and then made to forget it ever happened. IDK !
I even thought my mom had maybe given us some benadryle to make us sleep and we were having somekind of hallucination, even thought I didn't remember her giving us any meds that night. Even if that were the case, how would we hallucinate the same things in the same locations?

Well. I must say, your story made me feel not so crazy about my own. Thanks for sharin! S&F

TXML

I have read of Alien encounters where people have remembered similar things. Cartoon characters, or reassuring children's images. It has been suggested that these images are used to lessen the fear of an encounter - but that they usually get it wrong.

Kind of like the clown face is supposed to be a happy experience with the circus, but many people are afraid of them. The fun children's characters are reported as being creepy or scary instead of fun.

I have only read of reports where these kinds of cartoonish character masks are used, is with children.

As a marketing ploy, I'm not seeing a whole lot of successful peaceful encounters with the Aliens using this technique. Terror is the standard response to things, objects and cartoon characters that spontaneously appear to be walking and talking to children. There is a dread, and a genuine understanding that somehow, this should not be happening.

reply to post by azurecara

Yeah I've read about this somewhere. Doesn't Whitley Strieber mention it in one of his books?

I’ve even considered hypnosis to make sure I’m remembering accurately. Any suggestions or insight would be greatly appreciated.

reply to post by Longshots


Thanks for sharing. It is never easy to tell anyone when something unusual happens, even when you have a corroborating witness. Hypnosis is certainly worth considering but perhaps go with your brother so he can ensure the hypnotist does not ask any leading questions and record the whole session. I have been wanting to find someone myself who can take me back to unusual encounters throughout my life to see if they can be more clearly defined. If you do go ahead, please post your results/findings.

Cheers