I’ll get right to it. I suffered from insomnia at the time. Sophomore year in high school, I believe. I rarely slept through the night, and it took me forever to get to sleep. Waking up was the worst. I always felt under slept and groggy. But on this night I woke up instantly and bright-eyed.

I was facing the wall and I was nervous. I slowly rolled onto my other side and looked across my room. Somebody—a man—was sitting on my dresser, staring at me. He was sitting up straight, one leg crossed casually over the other. He held his hands cup-like in his lap. A softball- sized ball of light sat in his hands. Light radiated from this ball and illuminated his body. He had on knee-high boots and an open, billowy shirt. I stared at him for a few quick seconds, startled as any teenager would be. I turned over quickly and tried to find an explanation in my whirling head for his strange and sudden existence. I told myself he was simply a play on the moon light that was very bright that evening. It streamed in heavily from the sliding glass door that was the entrance to my room (my room had been built as an addition to the main house and shared only one common wall). I turned again and he was there, staring. He hadn’t moved at all. It wasn’t the moonlight.

I rolled back around, looking at my wall. My nose touched against it. What was he? Why was he here? And why did he wake me up? I never looked back. After an undetermined amount of time, I fell asleep. I thought about that night a lot for the next week. There seemed to be purpose in the event in that he—or it—definitely woke me up from sleep. But there was no communication involved. Should I have gleaned something from this? Was there a reason he wanted me to see him? Was I missing something? Finally, and most significantly for me--should I tell someone about it?

A week later, on our way to school in the morning, I decided to tell my mother. I spoke as she drove. When I was done I looked over at her. Her hands were white knuckled on the wheel. She looked spooked, and I didn’t like it. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Well,” she replied tentatively. “Your father and I didn’t want to tell you anything because we didn’t want to spook you.” “Yeah…” “What you just described is exactly what your father saw two nights ago.”

Prologue: My father is an atheist, so the experience was particularly puzzling for him. The logistics seemed to be the same. My father woke up from sleep, turned, and saw what I saw sitting on the banister across the bedroom. He spoke to it. He sat up and asked what it wanted. There had been no reply. “So I laid back down, turned over, and went back to sleep.” He said to me. “What do you think we saw?” I asked. He shook his head, cracked a little smile, and said: “Well, I’ll say two things about it. One, I just don’t have an answer to your question. Two, I don’t want you to worry too much about, ok?”
“Ok.” I said. “Ok.”