More Childhood Memories and Another Encounter

–New Study Shows Repressed Memories are Real

It is two thirty in the morning on March 17. I have just awakened from one of the most disturbing nightmares of my life. In this nightmare, I am in a school. It?s about 1948, and the school is in a large building that is, I believe, on Randolph Air Force Base. Our teacher is Dr. Krause. I am sent to conduct two new students up (or down) to the classroom. We must take an enormous freight elevator that has a door the slides open to one side, and then double doors that crack up and down.

We get in the elevator. I am cheerfully narrating our progress, thrilled to be able to run the elevator on my own. The buttons are as if at the top of a tower; I can barely reach them. (But then, I cannot have been more than four at the time, at most five.)

The elevator stops. I slide the inner doors open. But the outer doors do not open, will not open. I grow frightened, then terrified as the elevator slowly slides away from the doors. The wall before us is black, but not ordinary black. It is absolute black, a color that I have seen a few times before in my life, the color of absence, of eternal emptiness, of nonbeing, of the soul destroyed.

I feel protective toward the people with me. I try to explain to them that something has gone wrong. Then the darkness comes out of the wall and envelops me, and I realize that there is something terribly wrong with these people, with this whole situation. I am standing there, completely blind, in the middle of the horrible dark, feeling buried alive in the monstrous elevator, when a hand comes down on my shoulder, and I feel fingers touching my chest and neck that have monstrously pliant tips, full of tiny muscles, that probe against my skin.

At that moment, I woke up. I was sick with terror. Prior to that moment, the dream had involved trying to escape across the roofs of my old childhood home, to escape and hide in the night, to somehow find my way in the dark.

Story of my life, I suppose. In recent years, I have remembered a few snatches and bits along the lines of the above. Many of them revolve around a day camp I went to when I was very young. My first experience at this day camp was being made to parade naked before the other children, who were laughing at me. Then I used to be taken somewhere during the camp sessions, usually by one or two teachers from the camp, whom I remember quite vividly.

Once one of them took me to a house where there was a young man. I trusted my teacher and loved her. Because she was with me, I was not afraid. She and the young man gave me a demitasse of very sweet coffee, which pleased me because I was not allowed to drink coffee except on rare occasions. But then she disappeared somewhere in the house. I did not like the way this man was eyeing me. But I did not feel any sense of danger. I came from a powerful family, and I was used to a sense of being in control that came from my parents. However, I went to look for my teacher. I wanted to get away from this man, who had deep- set eyes and a pasty face and a strange sort of smile on his face.

I went through the house looking for my teacher. And I found her?tied up and gagged on a bed, her eyes stricken with terror. I ran back into the living room, with the intention to escape. But the man blocked my way. I could not escape, and I did not. After that, all is black.

Another time, I once again encountered this man, whose name, I believe, was Anthony Krause. He was also called Antonio Krause, and he took me and others sometimes to a villa in Monterrey, Mexico.

These are some other memories concerning him. They all take place between my fourth and eighth or ninth years. I do not have a time sequence for them, but I think that they are in approximate order:

The first is, we are going to a big estate in the station wagon of the day camp. The iron gates open and we are met with people who are holding big, cuddly bears. We are taught that the Soviet Union is good and that Stalin is the father of humanity. When I watch the faces of the teachers, I can see that they are lying, that they are sort of being silly. I cannot figure it out, but it is somehow very scary and disturbing, especially because none of the other children see it as I do. They all believe it. Afterward, I evolve in my mind a passionate hatred for Stalin.

The second takes place at my grandparents? country house. I awaken in the night. It is raining. I go downstairs, but I don?t know why I am doing this. I am under some sort of compulsion. I cross the front room and go into the dining room. Suddenly, I see the house as if it is in ruins. The rain is coming in through the gaping roof. It is an eerie situation. I recognize that I am operating under some kind of command, and I have a vague memory of being taught in a classroom what I would do. The next thing I know, I am looking out a side door, and I see Dr. Krause. He is getting ready to sneak into the house with a number of other men. I experience, at that moment, a feeling of absolutely extraordinary terror. But I also know that I cannot go to my parents for help. I have to help myself. Then the scene goes black.

In another of these dreams or memories, I am at the home of another child from the day camp. I have been stripped naked and I?m extremely upset. I run out into the street. Krause comes after me. The rest is black.

Another of these does not involve Krause. Instead, I am at the same house, but with my father. It is late at night when we are awakened by huge lights. Dad is dressed. He has a jacket on so it must be after November and before April. It could be any time from 1947 until 1955 or so. Just don?t know. He takes me out onto the front porch, down the walk. He is carrying me. We see lighted objects going over the house, landing in the back pasture, just below the brow of the rise. There is a lot of light back there, light and activity.

Suddenly, two car lights come up the curving driveway, moving very fast, unnaturally fast. I am taken to this ?car? but it is like no car I have ever seen.

A last memory, and I think this is the last time I saw Krause. I have been dressed up and my hair combed. I?m ready to go out somewhere. Then I see Krause walking up the front walk. I am absolutely horrified. I go out the window of the second story, onto a roof. From the peak of this roof, I can climb to a higher roof. I climb up, Krause just behind me. I am beside myself with terror, so much so that I try to fly off into space. I expect somebody to come down and rescue me but nobody comes. Then it goes to black.

What I think was going on was that I was involved in some kind of activity with this man. I went to classes at Randolph, and they were terrible, terrible experiences. Fear was everywhere, fear was my life. I believe that it is why my immune system shut down when I was seven. It was just the sheer stress of it all, stress so great that my little body literally tried to die.

But I did not die. Instead, I went on to become quite at ease with close encounter experiences and to do what I have done with my life.

I had a close encounter of sorts on the early morning of Thursday, March 9, 2000. As those of you know who listen to Dreamland, I have been having computer problems. Somebody has been continually pinging my computer from 38.27.174.106, 38.27.192.230, and 38.27.174.203. I have gotten as many as two hundred pings a day from these numbers. Plus, my disk drive as been doing strange things. (I complained about these pings to PSI Net, which is where they are coming from. There was no response from PSI Net as yet, but the pings have stopped.) At any rate, I woke up at 5:35 in the morning to see three dark figures leaving my office, which is across the hall from the bedroom. These appeared to me to be small figures, but I have no idea what was really there. When I saw them, I experienced an absolutely overwhelming surge of pure hate. It was very much like the experience I had many years ago when such a figure came into my bedroom and I threw furniture at it. (This is recounted in Transformation.) It was absolutely overpowering hate, worse than anything I would ever experience in daily life.

I got up and rushed after them, but did not see them again. Then I went into the office. My computer was going nuts. The disk drive was screaming. The cable modem was, however, not transmitting data. I was extremely concerned about all this and immediately tried to power the system down. The thing stuck and would not turn off. So I turned it off manually. Later, I turned it on again, and it took half an hour before it had finished powering up. Since then, it has worked normally.

A few days ago, I also had powerful corroboration that the visitors were involved in my childhood when a childhood friend discussed many long-forgotten incidents with me. He did not remember the Secret School, but he certainly recalled many other UFO related events in our neighborhood. That makes three such people now, all of whom have come forward on their own. I wonder about the man who used to give me breather calls at exactly seven-fifteen every morning, whom I remember as being somehow involved, and the others who are so reclusive now.

On the surface, I had such a happy childhood. It remains hard for me to believe that anything like this could have been transpiring under the surface. I was halfway ready to believe the False Memory Syndrome Foundation some years ago, until I discovered from reading Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd that this organization had among its founding advisors people who had published articles that said that sexual relationships between adults and children were good. Dr. Freyd, whose book was published by Harvard University Press, is the daughter of the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and claims in her book that she was herself molested as a child, and goes on to describe a mechanism of repression.

This book had a very powerful effect on me when I read it two years ago. I saw how the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was the darling of the media, how it was being used as an authoritative source everywhere, and how I strongly suspected that it might all have been set up as a ruse to discredit people making claims of abuse that were actually true.

The assumption in the media nowadays is that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation is entirely respectable and completely accurate. However, on March 16, information was released by researchers at University College London saying that data from a study of 236 adults with recovered memories shows that many are true and corroborated events in the past. Not all suppressed memories are about childhood sexual abuse, either. They can involve all sorts of trauma.

I have to tell you that I am in a kind of agony over all this. I WANT my life to have been as wonderful and happy as I remember it. I don?t WANT the visitors in my life. I am sick to death of being hounded and persecuted over them by people who want to suppress the truth. Why do they want to hide it? What?s the big deal? It seems that our strength, here, would come from knowledge, and that those who are keeping the visitors secret are helping them. But why? What good does it do?

There is such an amazing harvest of knowledge out there, what with there being so much physical evidence lying around just waiting to be studied by science. But instead we continue with the fiction that nothing is happening, that nobody is there, that people like me are all liars and deserve only to be rejected and laughed at and scorned.

–Whitley Strieber

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