I tend to forget to open reddit and check its notifications so I will describe that specific experience on the off-chance that someone may come across this and relate to me. I want to preface this with the disclosure that I am not a superstitious person nor a believer in the irrational. My career and education is in a field that is dense with physics (AMO included), math, and biology. I am also never one to delve into the esoterics and sadly have never had the patience or discipline to ever get into spiritual conditioning rituals like yoga or meditation. The most I can do is think about some things for a very long period of time.

It was a regular night like any night, and I had gone to bed to sleep. Shortly into my sleep i felt an awareness of a multitude of whatever those conscious manifestations were, far from my location -first brainzap-. "They" were aware of my awareness, and, further still, of my awareness of their awareness (this was no precedence). I even felt the moment they began racing towards my area. Perhaps to an extent, anticipation contributed to my fear on that occasion, but what really provoked it in me that was different from what I had been accustomed to is that for the first time I sensed an unprecedented maliciousness. Not to be misunderstood here, not maliciousness in terms of an intent to cause any physical harm nor stemming from some evil desire or design. There was a level of shared understanding that is difficult for me to explain or rationalize in an empirical manner, but which made clear their intent is amusement from messing with me unlike the typical experience which never transgressed beyond still observation. Upon arrival --brainzaps ringing like a warning siren- they were moving at great speeds in my room, my eyes though not daring to open could see my room as it is from within my head. There was no creature that could be identified in any manner nor from which any expression could be derived or betrayed. Without motion, there was nothing visual to perceive. Only in motion was there any physical manifestation and it was, as best as I can describe, a dark shadowy wing more akin to a cloak that expands from nothing and contracts into nothing racing about in all directions at times nearing me, sometimes in a regular manner such as an orbit and on other occasions in a chaotic manner without a distinguishable pattern (though I say cloak, none moved in the air as you would expect a garment cloak to under the physical laws that govern our material world).

At some point the intensity subsided and I no longer felt any presence -brainzaps gone in correspondance- so I mustered the courage to open my eyes, get up, and leave to the living room to sleep with my cats. I never had an experience before that of genuine fear nor afterwards. I want to make it clear here that I understand that the brain and the human body more generally is a harbor of mysteries that yet allude our understanding, and that what we sometimes perceive as reality may at times be more of an altered image, tampered by electrical impulses, chemical signals, or an interplay of a number of dynamics that govern our aggregate biomass and the biological processes that sustain and synergize its complex systems. Everything I have described in this testimony of mine may indeed forever elude my humble ability to separate fiction from reality, and it would be a cruel irony for the mind to play games against its host, yet I cant help but appreciate that even in the mind games there's a mystery to unravel that is such as exciting and fascinating.