The base idea is that at 5 years old what the heck did I know. These events were basically things to look back on later in my life, almost 40 years later in the beginning of the '90s. The constructivist approach understands this method, and it basically generated curiosity. I never forgot either of these events.
First experience: 1955: No exact date and was about five years old.
Woke up during the middle of the night to a lit up bedroom and the arrival of about five beings; nothing happened that I know of.
From my notes:
In the mid-‘50s the earth was being invaded by flying saucers and aliens all of the time through movies that came out, and also TV had its share of alien invasions and space-type shows. I had never heard of Roswell even though it was a handful of years prior to this. I remember being in my friend’s place one day on the top floor of our four-story apartment building in Bushwick, which is in Brooklyn NY. As I looked out the window and up Bushwick Avenue, I saw something huge hovering in the sky at a very low altitude. I called my friend and his mother to the window, and his mom told me it was just a blimp. Rats - I thought it was a flying saucer.
If this shows anything, it shows the impact TV and movies had on my young life at that time, but there still remains a problem regarding my visit that night. There was nothing in my TV / movie show experiences that painted a picture like the one I had that night. In fact, it would be about forty years before I ever ran into this scenario again in books, and when I did read about it - the memories came flooding back and there was a grand connection. Did this early event really happen? Why have so many other people experienced this exact same event structure?
In the 1950s I lived at 990 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn NY. This building is a three building in one apartment (990, 992, and 994), and each building has an inside and outside apartment. In between each building, constructed for the inner and outer center apartments, we had what we called airshafts that were large square cutouts between the outer and center apartment buildings. These cutouts allowed windows to be built for the bedrooms of those outer and inner apartments.
If there was something in the airshaft creating the light that I saw that night, it had to be small, and it had to be IN the airshaft. This apartment building was right on Bushwick Avenue in the middle of everything, and there is no way a large craft could have hovered over or near that building without being seen.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night lying on my right side facing the wall. I also remember something odd … I slept in pitch-black darkness, so, why was there light in my room? I remember raising my head to look at the window where the light was coming from. I remember a thought suddenly going through my head that said the light was from the bottom of the air-shaft where the connecting doors were; these doors gave access to the basements of both connected buildings. I never remember those lights EVER being on. I don’t remember ever THINKING about those lights. In fact, and as far as I can remember, I never knew there were lights down there. I do have a faint recollection of looking one day after the event – but it’s been a long time and is hard to place exactly when that was.
As I looked at the lit-up window I noticed something odd, it seemed like something (or someone?) was going by my window; I could see the tops of - heads? But how could that be … I lived on the second floor? Those shadows against my lit-up drawn-down paper shade were heading directly for the airshaft’s brick-wall of the apartment. On the other side of that wall was my closet. Beyond the closet was our apartment’s main hallway. Was I dreaming all of this?
As I lay on my left side now, I watched in the dim light created by the light coming in from the window. My closet, which was on the other side of my room and on the same wall as the window, had double-doors, and under it there was a pullout draw. Slowly, the closet doors began to open. Down stepped - someone - I just couldn’t see clearly, as the light was too dim on that side of the room. Then another stepped down, and another. One opened my bedroom door and came in from the hallway, another came right through the wall. That one was strange as it seemed the ‘hole in the wall’ he came through was high, and whoever - climbed down? There was no noise … was that a planted image, or was this all in my mind? I can’t remember if my baby brother’s crib was there at the time, as this would fix the time period more exactly; the picture I have would say no. Anyway, I just laid there looking at them, and they were now all standing there - looking at me? There wasn’t enough light for details on that side of the room, but oddly they were the traditional stature we read about - thin and about 4 foot or so tall. Was this really happening? And if it wasn’t, why does it sound so much like what other people had written about some forty years later?
Suddenly, they all began to move slowly - my way - and I ducked under the covers. I stayed there for the longest time, finally deciding to take a peek. As I slowly pulled back the blankets I could see the room was still lit-up. I figured THEY were at the foot of the bed, and there was NO WAY I was going to look, so, back under the covers I went. It was somewhere after that time I fell asleep, and sometime after that I again woke up in the same exact position. This time I took another peak and the room was dark. I supposed whoever it was had left, although I had NO intention of checking. I remained under the covers for the rest of the night.
Unlike the stories I had read decades later, there was no abduction memory, nor was there any meeting with alien beings. In fact that has never happened in my entire sixty-plus years of life. In even earlier notes from 1999, I had written that I had one memory of floating down the apartment airshaft headed towards my room. So it is possible SOMETHING was going on in that vein. Whatever transpired that night 50-odd years ago, it was the same, and it was different. I was scared, but there was no attempt to put me in a situation that crossed that line and completely panicked me.
How to deal with this event:
The constructivist method is a hands-on method of learning. Rather than sit in a class and write endless notes of the material that is verbally tossed at you by your teacher, and then doing endless hours of study in order to remember these facts, the constructivist method makes you ponder the picture and seek an answer yourself. Granted it has taken almost six decades for me to even figure this much out, and for the longest time I called this the Distance Factor, the unknown enigma where they do not get that close for some unknown reason. But after coming to grips with this approach, I wondered what would happen if I applied that principle to my overall picture.
The bottom line for this first event rests on the single idea that nothing was learned; it was an experience that, although odd and possibly could be called a dream, is consistent with other reports that paint a similar picture of a lit up room followed by an arrival. There was no abduction or contact as we usually read about, but then that has never happened to me that I know of. Categorizing this event is easy since there is no hard data to deal with; and even the sleep paralysis explanation does not fit because that never happened. It simply becomes a beginning picture, a starting place that generates “interest” and nothing more. This is something I can fall back on and ponder, but nothing else of value exists here. These types of events I log as entertainment value only, and the constructivist method calls the schema: ‘Piaget defined a schema as the mental representation of an associated set of perceptions, ideas, and / or actions. Piaget considered schemata to be the basic building blocks of thinking (Woolfolk, 1987).’
Piaget's Constructivism - Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology
Second experience: The next morning (?) as I was getting dressed for school.
From my notes:
On top of all of this, there was one more piece that I believe happened the next day as I was getting dressed for school; it was just an odd thought that ran very noticeably through my head; what I today call intrusive thoughts.
What ran through my head that morning was the single line: ‘The Catholic Church is wrong.’ What does a child that young do with a thought like THAT? Why would a strong thought like that even enter my little head? I look at my grandchildren today and run that scenario through my mind, and I can see that thought is WAY beyond anything they would entertain. So then, what was it … an inner expression of my own feelings about Catholic school in the ‘50s, or my first - message? I will say that after all of these years what ran through my head that morning was right, just not for any reason you would think of.
How to deal with this event:
So, if memory serves correctly here, during the night there was a lit-up bedroom event, complete with an arrival, and the next day this thought literally hit me from out of nowhere. My first question would be - why pick on the Catholic Church? I believe the answer is as simple as that was all I knew about regarding Christianity, which would be the main focus. I remember a bit later in my young life learning about some group called the Protestants, and they were dead wrong and going to Hell. Then there was some other group called the Jews, and I had no idea how they fit into the picture. This gives you a small idea of what I knew about this subject at that age.
This episode would be my first piece of information, and the only risk here is that if I considered it to be unimportant (I mean really, I was only five), I would forget about it entirely. But oddly that never happened; it was always playing somewhere in the back of my mind. If nothing else, it kept ‘interest’ alive.
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All the events in my life followed that "piece by piece" idea ... follow the bouncing ball so to speak. They never told me anything ... I had to do it all.
